How Having Too Many Options Affects The Negotiations Process

Image source: Harvard Business Review

Having more offers to choose from typically means you're better positioned. Knowing that you have many offers to leverage puts pressure on your counterpart to make a better offer so you don't leave the negotiating table. However, research has shown that having multiple alternatives can bias negotiators more than dealing with one single offer.

Five experiments were conducted, which involved 1527 people (MBA students, undergraduates, and online participants). Goals of the experiments were to see if having multiple alternatives:

• influences your ability to negotiate more than a single offer at once,
• seeing if multiple offers change negotiator's perception about an offer,
• if the quality of negotiator's final decision is negatively affected by having multiple offers,
• and what would be the best approach to take when having many options
  
  

Read the results of studies which show how having too many offers can impact negotiations in the Harvard Business Review article here.

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