Trust Development in Negotiation

Negotiation is a type of decision-making in the larger sense of social, psychological, and economic processes. A negotiation can be defined as a situation where multiple, interdependent parties with non-identical preferences make decisions that result in the allocation of resources (Neale and Northcraft, 1991). Early negotiation studies often used sim ple gaming scenarios like the Prisoner's Dilemma to test hypotheses, but these simple games are a poor proxy for real-world negotiations. Most early negotiation research studies presented problems to parties as isolated, decontextualized events. In contrast, real-world negotia tions usually occur in the context of an existing relationship between the parties, where there is an important and relevant past and a future (Oliver, Balakrishnan, and Barry, 1994). When negotiators have a rela tionship with one another, the dynamics of the negotiation process are altered (Austin, 1980; Corfman and Lehman, 1993; Kimmel et al., 1980; Polzer et al, 1993; Pruitt and Carnevale, 1993; Sheppard, 1995; Valley et al, 1995; Wall and Blum, 1991); parties temper their objectives,