Drawing from a wealth of negotiation research, my previous installment of Negotiating Life advised negotiators to make the first offer if they can. But sometimes they can't. Sometimes, despite a negotiator's best efforts, the other side moves first. In this article, I provide a framework for responding to another negotiator's first offer, suggesting that the appropriate response varies markedly depending on the quality of the offer. This makes for a more comprehensive strategy for making and managing early offers in a negotiation.

Most people believe that negotiators should avoid making the first offer. Yet, decades of research have documented the first-offer effect, wherein the person who moves first achieves a better outcome than the person who moves second. This gap between lay beliefs and research evidence may stem, in part, from the fact that studies on the first-offer effect are scattered across numerous scientific articles and journals. In hopes of bridging the gap and providing useful guidance to negotiators, this installation of Negotiating Life seeks to synthesize the evidence in one place. Reviewing many of the major articles on the first-offer effect, it concludes that negotiators should generally strive to make the first offer for specific reasons, in specific situations, and in a specific fashion.

A three-part framework that allows you to optimize the outcome of your negotiations, whatever the level of trust.