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://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/1bd4965e-f652-4391-b587-a8285e53bc67