The End of Negotiation as We Know it? – Future Scenarios on Buyer-Seller Negotiations

As buyer-seller negotiations play a central role in companies, they represent an important object of knowledge for negotiation research. However, negotiation science predominantly remains within the same field of research, instead of addressing current challenges and trends of buyer-seller negotiations and further support negotiation practice, which becomes especially crucial during the current changes due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Negotiation research should hence stronger focus on probable future developments in the core field of business negotiations. Therefore, we apply the structured and multi-method examination approach of the scenario analysis to buyer-seller negotiations. The results comprise a broad overview of five central future scenarios in the year 2030 and their individual drivers (1: Business as usual, 2: Digital Intelligence, 3a: Powerful Network - The Route to Collaboration, 3b: Powerful Network - The Route to Predominance, 4: System Crash). The revealed scenarios therefore provide a basis to derive suitable strategies for buyer-seller negotiations.