ABSTRACT
Many negotiations offer a potential for integrative agreements (through logrolling) in which the parties can maximize joint gains without competing for resources as in a zero-sum game; nevertheless, negotiators often fail to exploit this potential and settle for suboptimal, distributive agreements. Our aim is to get some insight on the causes that prevent negotiators from reaching integrative, Pare pareto-optimal agreements. We ran some experiments in which we tested the “fixed-pie bias” of negotiators, and we introduced a new explanation for suboptimality, based on the hypothesis of a satisficing (not optimizing) behavior of negotiators, which leads them to a “zone of agreement bias” (ZAB).
