The agony of opportunity in negotiation: Number of negotiable issues, counterfactual thinking, and feelings of satisfaction

It has long been believed in the negotiation literature that increasing the number of issues in a negotiation is a positive feature because it increases integrative opportunities. But does this also increase negotiator satisfaction? Two studies are presented that examine this relationship between the number of issues in a negotiation and feelings of satisfaction immediately following the negotiation. Results indicate that those who negotiated the most issues felt the worse about their outcome. The proposed mechanism for this effect, that negotiators who deal with more issues generate more counterfactual thoughts imagining better possible outcomes, was tested and confirmed. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.