Rebecca E. Hollander-Blumoff

Legal Research on Negotiation

This article addresses the study of negotiation in the legal context, discussing the methodology used by legal academics studying negotiation. It describes in brief the nature of current legal scholarship concerning negotiation and discusses potential obstacles to studying negotiations between lawyers. The article identifies two challenges for the study of negotiation in the legal setting: the institutional problems stemming from the current nature of legal scholarship and the methodological problems inherent in empirical study of the practice of law. The article offers ways in which empirical work on negotiation can contribute to legal academia, highlighting several areas in which further empirical research would be useful.

Procedural Justice in Negotiation: Do Nice Guys Finish Last?

Two correlational studies test the hypothesis that people base their acceptance of agreements reached through bilateral negotiation on the fairness of the process used to resolve the dispute in addition to focusing on their objective monetary outcomes or their subjective assessments of outcome favorability or outcome fairness. Additionally, the second study tests the hypothesis that negotiations characterized by greater procedural justice result in more potential for integrative bargaining. The results suggest that procedural justice encourages the acceptance of negotiated agreements, as well as leading to the opportunity for increased integrative bargaining.