The pernicious role of asymmetric history in negotiations

Author(s)

Linda Dezsö, George Loewenstein, Steinhart Jonathan, Gábor Neszveda, Barnabás Szászi

Abstract

The role of history in negotiations is a double-edged sword. Although parties can develop trust over time, there are also countless examples of protracted feuds that developed as a result of conflicting interpretations and invocations of history. We propose that, due to biased invocations of the past, history is likely to play a pernicious role in negotiations - particularly when given an asymmetric history in which one party benefited at the expense of the other. We test this prediction in two, two-stage experiments. We find that asymmetric history in a first stage leads to increased impasses in a second stage, but that this effect holds only when the second stage pairs the same two parties who shared the asymmetric history in the first.

Organisation(s)

Department of Occupational, Economic and Social Psychology

External organisation(s)

Tilburg University, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, Carnegie Mellon University, Austrian Institute of Technology

Journal

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

Volume

116

Pages

430-438

No. of pages

9

ISSN

0167-2681

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2015.05.016

Publication date

08-2015

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

502053 Economics, 501002 Applied psychology

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Economics and Econometrics, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Portal url

https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/the-pernicious-role-of-asymmetric-history-in-negotiations(1bd4965e-f652-4391-b587-a8285e53bc67).html