The effect of communication medium on negotiation performance

Abstract

Abstract.Concepts of media efficiency and media richness are employed to describe the impact of communication media on two key aspects of negotiation behavior--reducing uncertainty about the task, and managing equivocality about negotiator's bargaining orientation. A controlled experiment was conducted to examine how the use of either audio or text forms of verbal communication, and the presence or absence of visual communication, impacts negotiation performance in a bilateral monopoly task. Each member of a pair of negotiators received private instructions either to maximize joint profit (a cooperative bargaining orientation) or to maximize individual profit (an individualistic bargaining orientation). Negotiation performance was measured via the total amount of relative cooperativeness of verbal communication and joint profit. In the audio mode as opposed to the text mode, the total amount of verbal communication and joint profit was increased. In the presence of visual communication the relative cooperativeness and joint profit of pairs of individualistic negotiators was less than that of cooperative negotiators. In the absence of visual communication the relative cooperativeness and joint profit of pairs of individualistic negotiators was no less than that of cooperative negotiators. In sum the findings suggest that uncertainty regarding the logical structure of the task was reduced primarily via verbal communclation, while equivocality regarding the bargaining orientation of the other negotiator was reduced primarily via visual communication. The implications for group decision and negotiation research and practice are explored.

Negotiating over Mobile Phones: Calling or Being Called Can Make the Difference

“…No breakdowns have been observed like it happens, e.g., using text only chat or written documents. The second is that, via phone, the maximization of the individual profit (the number of won items in this work) tends to be more frequent than the maximization of the joint profit [43]. Still, nothing conclusive can be said about the comparison between mobile and landline phones without repeating the experiment with these latter.…”

“…According to the experimental protocols adopted in most negotiation studies [37,43,45,47], each subject participates only in one call. Therefore, it is not possible to verify weather a change in role for the same subject (e.g., from caller to receiver) corresponds to a change of persuasiveness as well.…”

“…Therefore, several works investigate how negotiation outcomes change when using communication media of increasing richness [37,43,45,47]. This latter cannot be measured quantitatively, but there is consensus on the following ordering (from lowest to highest richness): handwritten messages, e-mail, chat, telephone, video-conference and face-to-face interactions.…”

“…The experiments of [43] involve 55 dyads (110 subjects in total) acting in a buyer-seller scenario where the goal is to find an agreement about the price of several commodities. Some dyads negotiate face-to-face (with and without a computer at disposition), others via telephone or chat.…”

Measuring the impact of communication technology on group decision making

“…In theory, appropriate experimental design can create such circumstances. Practice shows that such decision making tasks tend to become too artificial to allow for generalization to real-life decision making contexts (Van Schaik, 1988;Kottemann and Remus 1991;Sheffield 1995). With this caution in mind, quality of decision process and decision outcome is taken as the dependent variable.…”