When sellers care about caretakers: Seller attachment shapes who gets to the bargaining table

Abstract

Negotiation research has often emphasized the active bargaining phase (including offers, concessions, and settlements), paying less attention to the preceding processes that bring parties together. This paper investigates how sellers’ emotional attachment to their possessions influences the negotiation “sales funnel”—the process through which sellers engage and sort through the field of potential buyers to determine which ones “get to the table” and to whom they ultimately sell. We propose that sellers with higher attachment assign greater importance to a buyer’s caretaking attributes (e.g., intentions to care for and preserve the possession) and devote more time and effort to seeking out such buyers. Across four preregistered studies involving over 1,500 participants, we examined whether attachment led to such “caretaker effects” in real-world transactions and a controlled experiment. Study 1 surveyed recent sellers from online marketplaces, finding that those with higher attachment invested more effort in vetting buyers and weighing buyer caretaking attributes more heavily in their decisions. Studies 2 and 3 examined home sales, with surveys of recent home sellers and real estate agents replicating the caretaker effects in high-stakes transactions. Study 4 experimentally manipulated seller attachment in a novel simulated inbox paradigm, establishing a causal link between attachment and search/engagement behavior. Together, our findings go beyond the traditional emphasis of “how much” in negotiation research to focus instead on the “who,” demonstrating that seller attachment shapes the negotiation process by influencing how sellers search for, engage with, and select potential buyers.