Alice J. Lee

• Columbia University

Negotiators often open with assertive offers to anchor discussions in their favor, yet this approach risks offending potential partners and foreclosing negotiations. Across four experiments, we demonstrate that hedged language softens proposals, allowing negotiators to remain assertive while reducing the risk of offending deal partners and preventi...

Negotiations are a careful balancing act between cooperation and competition—a successful negotiation requires extracting maximal value without offending and alienating a counterpart (i.e., the negotiator’s dilemma). It is thus surprising that negotiation scholars have largely overlooked a pervasive feature of negotiations: they entail “polite” spe...

Prior research shows that precise first offers strongly anchor negotiation outcomes. This precision advantage, however, has been documented only when the parties were already in a negotiation. We introduce the concept of negotiation entry, i.e., the decision to enter a negotiation with a particular party. We predict that precise prices create barri...

Although there has been tremendous scientific interest in social power, much of this recent research has relied on experiments in context-poor settings. However, organizations – a context in which power differences emerge naturally – are more complex and dynamic. The current review discusses whether and how defining organizational features at the i...

Past research paints a mixed picture of rationales in negotiations: Some findings suggest rationales might help, whereas others suggest they may have little effect or backfire. Here, we distinguish between two kinds of rationales buyers commonly employ – constraint rationales (referring to one’s own limited resources) and disparagement rationales (...

Whether in everyday disagreements, bargaining episodes, or high-stakes disputes, people typically see a spectrum of possible responses to dealing with differences with others, ranging from avoidance and accommodation to competition and aggression. We believe people judge their own and others' behaviors along this dimension, which we call interperso...

In the experiments reported here, we integrated work on hierarchy, culture, and the enforcement of group cooperation by examining patterns of punishment. Studies in Western contexts have shown that having high status can temper acts of dominance, suggesting that high status may decrease punishment by the powerful. We predicted that high status woul...

In the wake of recent revelations about US involvement in torture, and widespread and seemingly-growing support of torture in the US, we consider how people judge the value of information gained from informants under coercion. Drawing on past work on confirmation biases and moral judgments, we predicted, and found, that American torture supporters...

People habitually use round prices as first offers in negotiations. We test whether the specificity with which a first offer is expressed has appreciable effects on first-offer recipients' perceptions and strategic choices. Studies 1a–d establish that first-offer recipients make greater counteroffer adjustments to round versus precise offers. Study...