These Are Ours: The Effects of Ownership and Groups on Property Negotiation.

摘要

Ownership tends to affect negotiation by increasing the value that the negotiator places on the objects being negotiated. In this study, we invented a new computer-controlled negotiation task that presents negotiators pictures of objects on a screen and the negotiators grab the objects, or give them to an opponent, using a mouse. We experimentally varied ownership, telling negotiators in one case that they owned the objects (but needed the other's agreement on the distribution of the objects), or the other owned the objects (but their agreement was needed for distribution), or neither party owned the objects (and both had to agree on the distribution). We also varied whether negotiations were conducted by 3-person groups, or by individuals, and we varied the opponent's behavior in the negotiation (the other consistently demanded almost all the objects, hardly demanded any, or was totally responsive with a Tit-for-Tat strategy on the objects). We also varied the value of the objects, thus giving the task an integrative structure. One result was that groups were more likely than individuals to match the opponent's competitiveness, but only when ownership of the objects was undefined. Ownership, either self or other, attenuated differences between groups and individuals, an effect not observable in studies that use abstract negotiation tasks or prisoner-dilemma-type games.