Trade-off Difficulty in Negotiations: Generating and Realizing Agreements Under Interdependence

Trade-offs are fundamental to negotiation because agreements require parties to coordinate benefits and costs under conditions of interdependence. Recent negotiation research has identified a wide range of structural, psychological, and interactional factors that shape negotiators’ ability to generate and realize mutually acceptable trade-offs, yet these findings have rarely been synthesized within a common framework. Drawing on this emerging literature, this review organizes recent findings around the concept of trade-off difficulty, distinguishing between generative difficulty, which concerns identifying and constructing viable trade-off configurations, and restrictive difficulty, which concerns realizing them once identified. Viewing negotiation through this lens shifts attention from agreement outcomes toward the processes through which agreements are generated and realized.