Negotiating Inefficient Compromises: Is Less Better than More?

Significant efforts are made to design and implement decision and negotiation support systems to identify efficient alternatives. The underlying assumption is that decisionmakers prefer an efficient alternative over an inefficient one. Experimental studies indicate that people often accept inefficient compromises and are unwilling to improve them even if prompted to do so. This report presents preliminary results for the analysis of 605 bilateral negotiations in which only 20.8% of negotiators who achieved an inefficient compromise entered the post-settlement phase in an attempt to improve the compromise. iv About the Authors David Cray is a Professor at the School of Business, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Gregory Kersten was a Senior Research Scholar with the Decision Analysis and Support Project from July 1997-June 1998. He is now a Professor at the Department of Decision Sciences and MIS at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. 1 Negotiating Inefficient Compromises: ...