Doing The Right Things At The Right Time: How Negotiators Make Tradeoffs In Sequential Resource Allocation Negotiations

Resolving resource allocation conflicts is a great sustainability-challenge facing our society that can be tackled via negotiations. Resource allocation negotiations are often sequential, meaning they reoccur at different timepoints at which negotiators refine previous agreements (e.g., yearly political renegotiation of budgets). To achieve sustainable agreements, parties must create win-win tradeoffs in a current negotiation (allocating resources according to their priorities) without restricting their opportunities for win-win tradeoffs in upcoming negotiations (preserving resources to allow future win-win agreements). To understand how negotiators make tradeoffs in a sequential resource allocation negotiation with two sequences, we developed a novel negotiation task and conducted four preregistered interactive negotiation experiments (N=500). Preliminary results show a robust present bias: parties’ tendency to overclaim resources in their current negotiation at cost of integrative tradeoff-opportunities in the upcoming negotiation and, ultimately, at cost of high-quality sustainable joint outcomes. Theoretical implications and contributions for practitioners are being discussed.