Decision Making & Negotiations

Query Theory (QT) offers a psychological process theory of preference construction that shows how attentional processes and memory dynamics give rise to framing effects and other judgment and choice anomalies. These same anomalies are also modeled by Prospect Theory (PT) and its functional or "as-if" account, particularly through its feature of loss aversion.

Personalization has become the heartbeat of modern marketing. The rapid expansion of individual-level data, the proliferation of personalized communication channels, and advancements in experimentation have fundamentally reshaped how firms tailor their marketing strategies. Furthermore, causal inference and machine learning enable companies to understand how the same marketing action can impact the choices of individual customers differently. This article provides an academic overview of these developments.

Existing theories present a mixed account of how perceivers’ views of a target person’s antagonism relate to their perceptions of the target’s general competence and leadership effectiveness. We argue that, rather than being universal, the relationship between these perceptions varies according to perceivers’ idiosyncratic worldviews. In particular, we theorize and find across seven studies (total N = 2,065) that competitive worldview (CWV) serves as a lens through which perceivers interpret and evaluate others’ antagonistic behavior.

Negotiation research has often emphasized the active bargaining phase (including offers, concessions, and settlements), paying less attention to the preceding processes that bring parties together. This paper investigates how sellers’ emotional attachment to their possessions influences the negotiation “sales funnel”—the process through which sellers engage and sort through the field of potential buyers to determine which ones “get to the table” and to whom they ultimately sell.

One common explanation for the gender wage gap is that women have less favorable negotiation outcomes than men in labor markets. Yet, women might also start out with lower offers upon which negotiations occur. A challenge in examining the latter explanation has been that salaries, not salary offers, have been previously available to researchers. In this study, we overcome this empirical challenge by obtaining data on more than 700,000 initial salary offers provided to job candidates in the United States from 2017 to 2020.

Artificial intelligence promises to reshape negotiation education, not by replacing human judgment but by augmenting it. While recent research related to this topic varies on many dimensions, a salient dimension that organizes this review is temporal—whether the coaching occurs before, during, or after the negotiation of a deal. This temporal framework also elucidates differences between the projects presented at the AI Negotiation Summit in March 2025.

Experiments in online platforms frequently suffer from network interference, in which a treatment applied to a given unit affects outcomes for other units connected via the platform. This SUTVA violation biases naive approaches to experiment design and estimation.