Negotiating for Better or Worse : Changing Pie Sizes Affect Negotiation Relationships

How do parties in ongoing repeated negotiation relationships react to changing circumstances? We argue that situations that become more beneficial (i.e. offer potentially higher outcomes to both) can affect negotiatorsacute; relationships in two distinct ways. On the one hand, negotiators may see improving circumstances as more to share, which should lead to increased trust. On the other hand, negotiators may see it as more to fight about, which should decrease trust. We argue that social motivation (i.e., negotiators having a prosocial or pro-self motivation) may be a moderator, and explore this research question in a five-week repeated role-play negotiation experiment (N = 208). Contrary to our predictions, trust tended to increase in increasing and in decreasing sequences, maybe because participants did not recognize decreasing sequences as such. Implications for future research are discussed