A Call to Action and Its Echo: The Representation of Impasses in Negotiation Research Since Tripp and Sondak (1992)

Negotiation impasses can have severe negative consequences, but receive comparatively little research attention. Tripp and Sondak (1992) indicated that impasses are hardly investigated and insufficiently reported. One potential reason for this underrepresentation might be that impasses occur rarely in negotiation experiments. Traditionally, negotiation research focusses on the quality of agreements rather than whether an agreement is reached at all. Accordingly, we expect negotiation experiments designed to study the quality of agreements to employ methodological measures that keep impasse rates low (e.g., incentivizing participants for reaching agreements), which prevents a deeper understanding of impasses as a critical negotiation outcome. In this study, we aim to investigate whether the concerns brought up by Tripp and Sondak (1992) have changed since their call for action. Our second aim is to investigate how certain design choices affect the likelihood of impasses in experimental settings to gain valuable insights into the antecedents of impasses and to derive recommendations for designing studies to effectively investigate impasses. Thus, we conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of negotiation studies published since 1993. Data collection is currently in progress, but results will be presentable at the time of the conference.