Negotiation: what research says about first offers
The first offer is a charged moment: opening means taking a risk; waiting means leaving one to the other side. What does research say about this trade-off?
The anchoring effect
Adam Galinsky and Thomas Mussweiler (2001, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show experimentally that the first offer acts as an anchor: it pulls the endpoint toward itself, even among experienced negotiators. Opening is on average advantageous when the bargaining zone is known.
The information condition
The first-offer advantage depends on knowing the other party's margins. Without information on their costs, constraints or alternatives, an over-ambitious opening can stall the negotiation or signal perceived bad faith.
The limits of experiments
Most of these findings come from laboratory simulations with low stakes and student samples. Generalising to long commercial negotiations with ongoing relationships calls for caution. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What follows for practice
The question is not “open or wait” but “what do I know about the possible zone?”. Preparing three points — target, walk-away, alternative — before any opening is the literature's most stable recommendation.
A practical implication, verifiable in Zurich
Before a real negotiation, write the target, the walk-away point and the best alternative on one page, then have a colleague challenge all three. It is a ritual we install with Zurich sales teams. To go further: explore the Advanced Negotiation training in Zurich in the canton of Zurich, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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