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Abundant research has established that first proposals can anchor negotiations and lead to a first-mover advantage. The current research developed and tested a motivated anchor adjustment hypothesis that integrates the literatures on framing and anchoring and highlights how anchoring in negotiations differs in significant ways from standard decision-making contexts. Our research begins with the premise that first proposals can be framed as either an offer of resources (e.g., I am offering my A for your B) that highlights gains versus a request for resources (e.g., I am requesting your B for my A) that highlights losses to a responder. We propose that this framing would affect the concession aversion of responders and ultimately the negotiated outcomes. We predicted that when a first proposal is framed as an offer, the well-documented anchoring and first-mover advantage effect would emerge because offers do not create high levels of concession aversion. In contrast, because requests highlight what the responder has to give up, we predicted that opening requests would produce concession aversion and eliminate and even reverse the first-mover advantage. Across 5 experiments, the classic first-mover advantage in negotiations was moderated by the framing of proposals because anchor framing affected concession aversion. The studies highlight how motivational forces (i.e., concession aversion) play an important role in producing anchoring effects, which has been predominantly viewed through a purely cognitive lens. Overall, the findings highlight when and how motivational processes play a key role in both judgmental heuristics and mixed-motive decision-making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Increasing price precision leads to linearly stronger anchoring effects for amateurs, but highly precise anchors can backfire for experts. Previous research focused on experts bargaining about an object within their expertise domain (e.g., real-estate agents negotiated about a house listed at €978,781.63). This leaves unknown whether too much precision backfires for experts because of their (a) general negotiation expertise, (b) domain-specific pricing knowledge, or (c) the combination of general expertise and price-knowledge. Our pre-registered report seeks to replicate the too-much-precision effect and to experimentally separate general negotiation expertise from domain-specific price-knowledge. Seasoned experts (real-estate agents) negotiate about an object either within (house) or outside (motor yacht) their domain of expertise. We measure experts' willingness to pay (WTP), counteroffer, self-ascribed versus other-ascribed competence, and their self-ascribed versus other-ascribed price-knowledge. Based on responses of 400 professional real-estate agents, we replicate the advantageous anchor precision effect and illustrate that too much precision backfires regardless of whether agents negotiate within (house) or outside (yacht) their domain of expertise. Mediation analysis suggests that, consistent with previous research, the impact of precise anchors is due to the competence attributed to the negotiation opponent. Our results offer insights into the psychological mechanisms and theoretical understanding of anchor precision.

Past research has suggested a fundamental principle of price precision: The more precise an opening price, the more it anchors counteroffers. The present research challenges this principle by demonstrating a too-much-precision effect. Five experiments (involving 1,320 experts and amateurs in real-estate, jewelry, car, and human-resources negotiations) showed that increasing the precision of an opening offer had positive linear effects for amateurs but inverted-U-shaped effects for experts. Anchor precision backfired because experts saw too much precision as reflecting a lack of competence. This negative effect held unless first movers gave rationales that boosted experts' perception of their competence. Statistical mediation and experimental moderation established the critical role of competence attributions. This research disentangles competing theoretical accounts (attribution of competence vs. scale granularity) and qualifies two putative truisms: that anchors affect experts and amateurs equally, and that more precise prices are linearly more potent anchors. The results refine current theoretical understanding of anchoring and have significant implications for everyday life.