Aggressive Negotiators Win More Money But Destroy Something More Valuable, Study Says
Credit: ESMT Berlin, Photo: David Ausserhofer
First offers usually land more money, but are also more likely to damage relationships. In A NutshellThat bold first salary offer might get you an extra $10,000, but it could cost you something money can’t buy: the relationship itself.
An analysis of 90 studies involving more than 16,000 negotiations reveals a troubling trade-off at the heart of hardball tactics. After analyzing 374 separate effects across 57 years of research, a team led by Leuphana University’s Hannes Petrowsky found that people who make aggressive first offers do walk away with better deals, but they also face dramatically higher chances of losing the deal entirely and permanently damaging how the other person views them.
“Moving first and making an ambitious offer generally leads to claiming more value,” the researchers write in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. The problem? “Ambitious first offers also lead to increased impasse likelihood and worse subjective value perceptions.”
You might negotiate a higher starting salary, but your new boss now sees you as difficult. You might get a better price on that house, but the seller resents you. The research team, led by Leuphana University’s Hannes Petrowsky and including scholars from Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and other major institutions, spent years compiling decades of negotiation research to understand this paradox.
The Hidden Price of WinningWhen negotiations reach agreements, first movers do claim more value, according to the study. The meta-analysis found moderate-to-large positive effects, with ambitious offers producing a correlation of 0.62 between offer level and final outcome. Negotiators who made ambitious first offers got better deals than those who played it safe or waited for the other side to speak first.
But zoom out to include negotiations that fell apart, and the picture turns dark. The research shows aggressive first offers increased the odds that talks would collapse entirely, with a moderate negative effect on reaching agreement. They also poisoned how recipients felt about the negotiation process, the outcome, and the person sitting across the table, producing a moderate negative effect on what researchers call “subjective value.”
Two preregistered experiments conducted by Petrowsky’s team with more than 2,000 participants confirmed the pattern. Higher first offers consistently produced better counteroffers and final agreements. They also consistently triggered more deal-breaking impasses and worse relationships. The trade-off proved remarkably stable across different scenarios.
For many negotiations, that damaged relationship matters more than the extra money on the table. Landing a job with a boss who thinks you’re greedy before you even start rarely ends well. Buying a house from sellers who hate you can poison your first months in a new neighborhood.
Make the first offer, but be realistic. Very high demands increased the likelihood of negotiations breaking down. (Credit: ESMT Berlin, Photo: David Ausserhofer)
Anger Drives People to Walk Away
The experiments revealed what happens psychologically when someone receives an aggressive first offer. Among all the emotional and cognitive factors Petrowsky and his colleagues tested, one stood out as the most powerful driver: anger.
When people get hit with what they see as an unreasonable opening number, they get mad. That anger drives them to walk away from deals that might otherwise make sense and colors their entire perception of the person making the offer.
“Anger drove the effects on impasses and subjective value,” the researchers found.
The study also found that aggressive offers make recipients view the offer maker as unpleasant. This perception feeds into a destructive cycle. The more unpleasant you seem, the worse the other person feels about the negotiation, and the more likely they are to either reject the deal outright or resent you if they accept.
Power perceptions cut both ways. An ambitious first offer can signal confidence and strength, sometimes leading to better counteroffers. But cross the line into seeming unreasonable, and that signal of power becomes a signal of arrogance.
The classic explanation for why first offers work is anchoring. Petrowsky’s team expected people would consciously adjust away from aggressive anchors through a process called “insufficient adjustment.” Instead, the experiments found something surprising: participants reported they’d adjusted plenty through what researchers call “selective accessibility,” even though objectively they hadn’t moved nearly far enough. People don’t realize they’re being influenced, which makes the tactic feel manipulative when they later figure it out.
How you approach a negotiation may depend on how well you know the person on the other end of the table. (Credit: ESMT Berlin, Photo: David Ausserhofer)
One-Time Deals vs. Long-Term Relationships
The research offers a clear formula: If you’ll never see the person again and the relationship doesn’t matter, go ahead and make an aggressive first offer. Selling your old car to a stranger? Negotiating a one-time purchase? The extra money likely outweighs any relationship damage.
Most negotiations don’t work that way. Most happen between people who will continue interacting, where reputation matters, or where goodwill has economic value. In those situations, the relational damage from aggressive tactics can cost more than the extra money gained.
The researchers caution that negotiators should tread carefully when the relationship matters, when dealing with multiple issues, or when they need the other person’s goodwill down the road.
Complexity matters too, according to the analysis. In simple, one-issue negotiations like haggling over a single price, first-mover advantages are strongest. The meta-analysis revealed that these distributive negotiations showed the largest effects. Add more issues, and everything changes. As negotiations became more integrative, involving multiple issues with different priorities, first-offer effects shrank considerably.
In multi-issue negotiations, moving first can accidentally reveal information about your preferences that savvy counterparts exploit. You might think you’re anchoring them, but you’re actually giving away your hand.
Organizations should stop training everyone to always move first aggressively. Sales teams handling one-shot transactions can benefit from the strategy. Procurement specialists building partnerships with suppliers need a different approach entirely.
The study drew from negotiations spanning 1968 through early 2025, mostly using Western participants in one-time interactions. Petrowsky’s team examined everything from laboratory experiments to scenario-based studies, creating what amounts to the most comprehensive look at first-offer effects ever compiled. Still, with nearly 400 effects from more than 16,000 participants, the core finding is hard to ignore, according to the researchers. Aggressive first offers are powerful tools that damage relationships. Whether that trade-off makes sense depends entirely on how much you value the relationship compared to the money.
Paper Notes Study DetailsThis research combined a comprehensive meta-analysis with two preregistered experiments. The meta-analysis examined 90 studies published between 1968 and early 2025, analyzing 374 effect sizes from 16,334 participants. The team coded studies for negotiation type (distributive vs. integrative), number of issues, and whether parties had ongoing relationships. Two preregistered experiments (N = 2,121 total participants) tested specific psychological mechanisms including anger, power perceptions, and anchoring processes. The experiments manipulated first-offer levels and measured counteroffers, agreement rates, subjective value, and emotional responses.
Key FindingsFirst offers showed a strong positive correlation (r = 0.62) with final outcomes when deals closed. The effect of moving first produced a moderate positive effect (g = 0.42), while the magnitude of ambitious offers showed a large effect (g = 1.14). However, ambitious first offers also produced moderate negative effects on impasse likelihood (g = -0.42) and subjective value (g = -0.40). Anger emerged as the strongest mediator of negative outcomes. Effects were significantly moderated by negotiation complexity, with the strongest effects appearing in simple, distributive negotiations and the weakest in complex, integrative negotiations involving multiple issues.
LimitationsThe meta-analysis found high variability in effect sizes, suggesting that first-offer effects depend heavily on context. Most studies used vignette designs or laboratory experiments rather than real negotiations. The vast majority of participants came from Western societies, limiting cultural generalizability. Only a small number of studies measured the psychological mechanisms directly. The analysis could not fully account for dyadic factors like interpersonal chemistry that affect real negotiations. The time span of included studies (1968-2025) means earlier research may not reflect contemporary negotiation norms or practices.
Funding and DisclosuresThis research was funded in part by the INSEAD Hoffmann Institute. The authors declare no competing financial interests or conflicts of interest.
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