About the causes of irrational negotiation impasses

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Recently, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations between the European Union and the United States of America have come to an abrupt halt. When former German Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, Sigmar Gabriel, was publicly asked about the progress in the negotiations in August 2016, he answered: “I believe that the negotiations with the United States have de facto failed, even though nobody is really willing to admit it. They had 14 negotiation sessions about 27 chapters and they did not manage to create a single joint text for a single chapter.” Negotiations had originally started in July 2013 and have not been concluded to this day. Whether or not they will be reopened remains unclear. This is just one prominent example of a negotiation impasse from the recent past. Others can be found in economic (e.g., stalemates in collective wage bargaining; e.g., The Guardian, 2018) and governmental contexts (e.g., failed attempts to find peaceful agreements with hostage takers; e.g., Villamor, 2017). They illustrate that negotiation impasses can have severe negative consequences for individuals, organizations, and even entire societies.This realization sparks two important, yet still unanswered questions: Why do negotiations end in impasses? And which factors play a role in preventing impasses? While negotiation researchers have thoroughly investigated which factors maximize the quality of agreements, much less research has been conducted on what has to be done to secure an agreement in the first place. This research provided insights into antecedents of impasses, but the process leading to impasses and its moderators are not well understood yet.The current research project thus aims to investigate this process along with behaviors that trigger it and the moderating conditions under which it unfolds as suggested in a recent theoretical account (Mertes & Hüffmeier, in preparation). In the first two experimental studies, I aim to test the effect of two types of critical negotiator behaviors (distributive negotiation behavior and inadequate social behavior) on the likelihood of impasses and two proposed mediators of these effects. In the two subsequent experimental studies, two potential moderators of these mediations will be studied. In doing so, this research contributes to the theoretical understanding of impasse emergence as one of two possible negotiation outcomes (i.e., impasse vs. agreement). It also has applied promise as investigating moderators of this process will hopefully reveal strategies that negotiators can use to prevent impasses and their costly consequences.