UC Irvine

In the past four decades, the importance of international trade has burgeoned, from 17 percent of world gross domestic product to over 37 percent now. The academic literature on international commercial negotiations has not kept up. This chapter begins with a brief review of the extant literature on the topic of international business negotiations. It describes the methods used in our laboratory studies of negotiation behaviors, processes and outcomes in 22 countries. This is followed by applications of two advances in measurement, linguistic distance and facial expression coding technologies. It continues with a discussion of qualitative approaches that include methods focused on emic (versus etic) interpretation. The chapter closes with a third theory of negotiation, one that goes beyond the American views of competitive and integrative bargaining theories, and one that emphasizes relationships over agreements and the search for mutual opportunities over problem solving.