Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Negotiations are essential and fundamental moments of life. Improving negotiation skills, as well as increasing the ability to negotiate effectively, is crucial in managerial, political, and business contexts. [75] Simon's (1957) bounded rationality acknowledges that individuals, while attempting to make rational decisions, often lack important information and the relevant criteria of problems, and prior literature in psychology has demonstrated that negotiators do not always act rationally.
What is the discipline's current grasp of cognitive biases in negotiation processes? What lessons can be drawn from this body of literature? Decision-making studies about cognitive biases have mainly focused on individual decision-making. However, negotiation decisions are often made in conjunction with other parties, which may commonly have different interests ([6] Bazerman and Carroll, 1987; [30] Fisher et al. , 1981; [49] Lax and Sebenius, 1986; [51] Lewicki et al. , 2005; [65] Pruitt, 1981; [68] Raiffa, 1982; [81] Thompson, 2001; [90] Walton and McKersie, 1965; [95] Zartman, 1977). As individual decisions are often affected by cognitive biases, which rarely make these decisions completely rational, the same applies to negotiated decisions between several parties. In this paper the term rationality refers to the decision-making process that is logically expected to lead to the optimal result, given an accurate assessment of the negotiator's values and risk preferences ([10] Bazerman and Moore, 2009, p. 4).
The topic of cognitive biases within negotiations has been analyzed in the International Journal of Conflict Management on a few occasions with reference to the perception of fairness ([62] Paese and Yonker, 2001) and multilateral negotiations ([86] Traavik, 2011). Some recent reviews of the literature on cognitive biases appeared in the literature, but they focused only on biased decision-making processes ([10] Bazerman and Moore, 2009; [15] Brooks, 2011; [29] Eberlin and Tatum, 2005; [55] Morgeson and Campion, 1997).
Although it is commonly seen as an important topic, the investigation of cognitive biases in the field of negotiations is under-researched. A gap in the literature is identified in journal articles systematizing the intersection of negotiation studies, from the group decision-making literature, and cognitive biases studies, and from the judgment and decision-making literature. While [84] Thompson et al. (2006) critically reviewed the implications of biased decision-making processes for negotiations, this work intends to help to fill...