Making two offers with different tradeoffs sets the framing of the negotiation and reduces the amount of back and forth. For example, making two job offers to the same candidate—one high salary but lower equity and one lower salary but higher equity—and asking them to pick—eliminates a lot of the need to negotiate (which most people don’t like to do). Using this strategy makes it more transparent to the other party how to model the deal and empowers them to decide.
See also:
- If negotiation is a coordination problem then making multiple offers at the same time accelerates finding the Schelling point
- The poverty of compromise
- Salary negotiations are more balanced between parties (you’ve probably done several and can ask others), you should be skeptical of this strategy in a negotiation with high information asymmetry
Links to this note
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The door-in-the-face technique is a negotiating tactic is when you ask for something rediculous so that your next ask is more likely to be agreed to. This has been proven to be effective in a psychology study in 1975 and then replicated in 2021.