BLACK-HAT WHITE-HAT STRATEGY IN BILATERAL NEGOTIATION

The black-hat/white-hat strategy is a sequential process involving two people who work as a team in a negotiation against an adversary. The first person in the sequence, the black hat, takes a competitive stance toward the adversary; the second in the sequence, the white hat, takes a more cooperative stance. The presumed effect is success in eliciting concessions from the adversary and reaching agreement. The experiment reported here simulated a buyer-seller negotiation to assess the effects of the temporal ordering of the black-hat and white-hat strategies. Subjects, as buyers, negotiated twice with computer-simulated sellers who were either cooperative or competitive in the first negotiation and cooperative or competitive in the second. The results suggested that strategy shifts can play an important role in negotiation: when a new strategy was presented (either more cooperative or more competitive), there was increased concession-making by subjects and reduction of distance between offers. The black-hat/white-hat strategy was most likely to reduce distance and reach agreements. The black-hat/black-hat strategy was least successful by these measures. Evidence of contrast effects was obtained in perceptions of opponent cooperativeness: the black-hat/white-hat strategy produced the greatest perceived cooperativeness. The black-hat/white-hat strategy benefited from two processes: 1. concessions of the white-hat in the second negotiation in reducing distance from agreement, and 2. greater perceived cooperativeness due to the contrast effect. Several indexes of collective efficiency indicated that a black-hat/white-hat aggregate of strategies was more efficient than any other combination of strategies. © 1993 Academic Press, Inc.