Concession crossover in electronic negotiations

Abstract Negotiation is a joint decision making process involving making concessions by the parties. Concession-making may involve giving up negotiator’s utility and is an essential activity in the negotiation process. In the past it has been suggested by some authors that negotiators utility functions over the issues may not be linear. In this case, a phenomenon called “concession crossover” takes place, in which a negotiator may switch issues on which they choose to make concessions at some point in negotiations. This work sets to investigate the validity of such claims. To this end we introduce several concession-making models and use them for testing hypotheses. We have used a dataset from online negotiation experiments featuring a contract-signing case. The results support the claim that concession crossover does indeed occur.