A NASTY BUT EFFECTIVE NEGOTIATION STRATEGY - MISREPRESENTATION OF A COMMON-VALUE ISSUE

Conflicts sometimes involve issues for which both parties want the sam e outcome, although frequently parties fail to recognize their shared interests. These common-value issues set the stage for a nasty misrepr esentation strategy: feigning opposed interest on the common-value iss ue to gain an advantage on other issues. In a laboratory negotiation s imulation, participants used misrepresentation in 28% of their negotia tions. The strategy was more likely to occur when negotiators had indi vidualistic motives and was less likely to occur when both parties rea lized their common interests. Use af the strategy led to favorable out comes, and these were best predicted by negotiator aspirations, rather than perceptual accuracy. The authors discovered two forms of the str ategy: misrepresentation by commission (the user actively misrepresent ed his or her common-value issue preferences) and misrepresentation by omission (the user concealed his or her common-value issue interests when the other person made a favorable offer).