How Do Negotiators Resolve Conflict Over Resources of Changing Value: The Role of Trust in Sequential Negotiations

Managing limited natural resources is an important sustainability challenge, requiring efficient conflict resolution among parties in a dynamically changing environment. To address these challenges, humans have developed sequential negotiations—adaptive joint decision-making processes enabling efficient, forward-looking agreements that consider all parties’ priorities and the changing value of resources over time. Across three incentivized, face-to-face negotiation experiments (N = 330), we systematically investigate when and why negotiation dyads succeed or fail in reaching efficient agreements in sequential allocation negotiations, thereby leveraging the changing value of resources. Because trust may be an important psychological factor in reaching efficient agreements in such sequential negotiations, we manipulated trust levels (high vs. low) between negotiating pairs and progressively increased its relevance across experiments. Across both distribution (Experiments 1 and 2) and contribution negotiations (Experiment 3) and regardless of trust, dyads consistently prioritized resolving immediate conflicts of interest during the initial negotiation, failing to leverage changes in resource values and limiting their ability to reach efficient agreements over time. Integrating elements from environmental, social, and negotiation psychology, this research highlights challenges in sequential negotiations with dynamic resource values and provides a basis for evidence-based interventions to enhance agreement efficiency.