Negotiating Expected Outcomes: Value Creation In Risky Contexts

Negotiations are commonly future-oriented, meaning that negotiators not only have to mentally balance prospective costs and benefits (i.e., value of outcomes), but also have to consider the likelihood that these prospective outcomes will take effect (i.e., probability of outcomes). However, little is known about how negotiators perceive and deal with different expectations of outcomes. In the present work, we seek to systematically investigate negotiators trade-off behaviors (i.e., value creation) when confronted with uncertain (expected), instead of certain (definite) outcomes. Preliminary results of two interactive negotiation studies (n = 300) indicate that negotiators trade-off expected for more certain, definite outcomes. This way, negotiators create less integrative win-win agreements for their expected, compared to their definite outcomes, irrespective of the expected outcomes probability size or range. We argue that negotiators showing trade-off behaviors in favor of (more) certain outcomes can be problematic in various domains ranging from business deals to sustainability-related negotiations.