UC Irvine

Our study examines the effects of culture on negotiation behaviors and outcomes. We also explore how culture moderates the relationships between those behaviors and outcomes, a subject that has been neglected by most researchers. Our work integrates theories and methods from many areas of the behavioral sciences: marketing science, decision analysis, behavioral economics, game theory, social psychology, anthropology, sociolinguistics, linguistics, content analysis, and structural equations modeling. The data were created in a laboratory setting in which 1,197 businesspeople from 20 cultural groups participated in a three-product buyer–seller negotiation simulation. In this article we first describe how our database was developed. Second, we look at how observed behaviors are associated with questionnaire-derived negotiation processes and outcomes. Third, we develop a new tool for understanding cultural differences and use it to investigate how culture influences negotiation behaviors, processes, and outcomes across the 20 cultural groups included in our database.