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7 min readentrepreneurship / productivity

Move first and open high: 90 studies on first offers in negotiation

Someone has to say the first number. Negotiation courses teach both answers: open first and anchor the deal, or wait and read the other side. A preregistered meta-analysis published this year closes the money question across 90 studies and 16,334 participants. Moving first is worth g = 0.42 on the value of the agreement, and an ambitious first offer beats a moderate one by g = 1.14 1. I price training weeks, so I read that literature as operational.

What the research shows.

Hannes Petrowsky and 14 co-authors pooled 374 effect sizes from studies published between 1968 and early 2025. Three findings on the economic side. Making the first offer beat letting the other side open (g = 0.42, measured across 80 effects). The size of the first offer tracked the value of the final agreement (r = 0.62). Ambitious first offers outperformed moderate ones on agreement value (g = 1.14, across 187 effects). Their two experiments (N = 2,121) traced the counteroffer effect to selective accessibility: the recipient starts searching for information consistent with your number 1.

Adam Galinsky and Thomas Mussweiler had shown the asymmetry in 2001. Whichever side opened, buyer or seller, finished with the better outcome, and first offers predicted settlement prices. The same experiments found the defense. When the receiving negotiator focused on information inconsistent with the opening number, their own reservation price or the opponent's limits, the first-mover advantage disappeared 2.

Two features of the number itself change how hard it lands.

Precision. Malia Mason, Alice Lee and Daniel Ames compared round openings with precise ones, $1,500 against $1,486. Recipients read the precise figure as informed and conceded less ground in their counteroffers 3. David Loschelder and colleagues then found the ceiling. Across five experiments with 1,320 participants in real-estate, jewelry, car and HR negotiations, precision helped in a straight line with amateurs but followed an inverted U with experts, who read excess decimals as a sign of low competence 4.

Range instead of a point. Daniel Ames and Malia Mason tested range offers against single figures. Bolstering ranges, where your target sits at the near end and the range extends toward the ambitious side, improved outcomes. Backdown ranges and ranges that bracket the target did not. Two mechanisms carried the effect: both endpoints read as information about your reservation price, and a range makes an extreme counteroffer feel impolite 7.

The wording around the number is a separate lever. Alice Lee, Malia Mason and Claire Malcomb ran four experiments on hedged openings, the "I was thinking something around" framing in front of an assertive figure. Among the pairs that reached a deal, the sale price did not differ between hedged and direct phrasing. Hedging won on the other outcome: fewer counterparts walked away, which left hedged negotiators ahead overall 8.

Ambition buys money and costs deals.

The same meta-analysis measures the bill. Ambitious first offers raised impasses (g = -0.42, across 13 effects) and lowered the subjective value the recipient took away from the deal (g = -0.40, across 41 effects). In the authors' experiments, anger drove both 1.

A 2025 study of more than 26 million asynchronous online negotiations, paired with a controlled experiment (N = 213), found the same trade on the receiving side. Ambitious counteroffers from buyers bought lower prices and raised the risk of no deal at all. Timing came out cleaner than magnitude: late counteroffers improved the price and reduced impasse risk together 11.

Three conditions that reverse the advice.

Yossi Maaravi and Aharon Levy built a pawn-shop scenario where one party knew the item's market range and the other did not. Across their experiments, both sides did better when the informed party held back its number 9. Jiang and Ma replicated that second-mover advantage in 2019 and added the boundary. It held when the uninformed buyer expected a price above market value, while an uninformed buyer expecting a low price made the informed seller better off opening first 10.

A precise opening also keeps people from engaging. Alice Lee and colleagues ran six studies (N = 1,580) plus an archival analysis of 11,203 real-estate records. People were less likely to enter a negotiation at all against a precise opening than against a round one, because they read precision as inflexibility 5. Margarita Leib and colleagues found the market condition that flips the rule. In a preregistered study with 1,809 participants and 8,278 Amsterdam housing transactions, 70% of which sold above asking, round asking prices drew higher counteroffers in a seller's market, with the precise-price advantage holding in a buyer's market 6.

The effect also shrinks as a deal gets more complex. In the meta-analysis, first-offer effects fell and their mechanisms changed as the number and type of issues rose 1. On a one-number deal the opening does the work. On a deal with scope, timeline and payment terms, the issue list does.

The protocol.

  1. Before the call, write two numbers: the floor you will not cross and the target you will open on, each with the comparable deals behind it. The 2001 experiments show the defense against someone else's anchor is your own reservation price, so arrive carrying it 2.
  2. Name your number first when you know the going rate. When the other side knows this market and you do not, make them open and expect to do better for it 910.
  3. Set the opening at the top of what you can defend out loud. Ambitious openings beat moderate ones by g = 1.14 on agreement value, and raise impasses by g = -0.42 1: the ceiling is the last figure you can give a reason for.
  4. Use a precise figure with a counterpart who is not a specialist in this market: 18,400 rather than 18,000 3. With an expert, keep the precision moderate and attach the reason the number is what it is 4.
  5. Say it as a bolstering range with your target at the low end: "18,400 to 21,000, depending on the number of sites" 7. Keep the width narrow enough that the low end stays credible 7.
  6. Keep the figure and soften the sentence around it. "I was thinking something around 18,400" holds the price and loses fewer counterparts 8.
  7. Log three fields per proposal: the number you quoted, the outcome, and whether they walked. No study sets the threshold, so here is the line I use: an impasse rate above 1 in 4 means the opening has passed what I can defend, and the subjective-value cost is landing on people I will meet again 1.
  8. When they open first, do not counter from their figure. Restate the number you prepared, with the comparables 2. On email or a platform, send a considered counteroffer later in the exchange instead of replying at once 11.

Write your next quote tonight as two numbers and one hedged sentence, before the client asks for it.

Sources.

  1. Petrowsky, H. M., Boecker, L., Escher, Y. A., et al. (2025). The power and peril of first offers in negotiations: A conceptual, meta-analytic, and experimental synthesis. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 191, 104448. doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2025.104448
  2. Galinsky, A. D., & Mussweiler, T. (2001). First offers as anchors: The role of perspective-taking and negotiator focus. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(4), 657-669. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.81.4.657
  3. Mason, M. F., Lee, A. J., Wiley, E. A., & Ames, D. R. (2013). Precise offers are potent anchors: Conciliatory counteroffers and attributions of knowledge in negotiations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(4), 759-763. doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2013.02.012
  4. Loschelder, D. D., Friese, M., Schaerer, M., & Galinsky, A. D. (2016). The too-much-precision effect: When and why precise anchors backfire with experts. Psychological Science, 27(12), 1573-1587. doi.org/10.1177/0956797616666074
  5. Lee, A. J., Loschelder, D. D., Schweinsberg, M., Mason, M. F., & Galinsky, A. D. (2018). Too precise to pursue: How precise first offers create barriers-to-entry in negotiations and markets. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 148, 87-100. doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2018.03.001
  6. Leib, M., Köbis, N. C., Francke, M., Shalvi, S., & Roskes, M. (2021). Precision in a seller's market: Round asking prices lead to higher counteroffers and selling prices. Management Science, 67(2), 1048-1055. doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2019.3570
  7. Ames, D. R., & Mason, M. F. (2015). Tandem anchoring: Informational and politeness effects of range offers in social exchange. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(2), 254-274. doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000016
  8. Lee, A. J., Mason, M. F., & Malcomb, C. S. (2025). Hedging first offers permits assertiveness while lowering risk a partner walks. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 16(8), 953-962. doi.org/10.1177/19485506241305486
  9. Maaravi, Y., & Levy, A. (2017). When your anchor sinks your boat: Information asymmetry in distributive negotiations and the disadvantage of making the first offer. Judgment and Decision Making, 12(5), 420-429. sas.upenn.edu
  10. Jiang & Ma (2019). "When your anchor sinks your boat": A replication and extension study. Journal of Economic Psychology, 75, Part A. doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2019.01.001
  11. Teichmann, Petrowsky, Escher, Lee & Loschelder (2025). Optimizing counteroffers: How timing and magnitude shape sale prices and impasses in 26 million asynchronous online negotiations. Group Decision and Negotiation, 34, 823-848. doi.org/10.1007/s10726-025-09932-1

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