OFFER: Behaviorally Coding Indirect and Direct Information Exchange in Negotiations

Negotiators exchange information about their interests and priorities indirectly via offers and substantiation (attempts to influence the counterpart to make concessions) as well as directly via a reciprocal exchange of questions and answers (Pruitt, 1981). We developed OFFER to code indirect as well as direct information exchange. Interests are the underlying reasons for the positions that negotiators are taking – why they want what they want. Priorities are the relative importance of issues and issue options to negotiators. Negotiators use insight about each other’s interests and priorities to make offers that trade-off one party’s low-priority issue for the other party’s high-priority issue. Trade-off agreements are called value creating because each negotiator gets more of what is most important to that negotiator. Value-creating agreements are generally operationalized by the negotiators’ joint gains (the sum of each negotiator’s gains).