Culture, fairness, and trust: Contrasting influences on negotiation behavior and outcomes in China, Korea, Japan, and the United States

Negotiations are integral to marketing transactions, whether they concern price, or product or channel attributes. Since business transactions increasingly transcend national and cultural boundaries, marketers need to recognize the implications of cultural differences on the decision making process in negotiations. The objective of this dissertation is to gain a greater understanding of the influence of culture upon behavior and outcomes in a variety of negotiation settings within China, Japan, Korea, and the United States.; Negotiations provide a setting where each party can be cooperative, competitive, or both. In this research I examine negotiations in which competition is the dominant economic equilibrium, and investigate a number of cultural and contextual factors likely to prompt, and perhaps sustain, out-of-equilibrium cooperative behavior. The factors I examine fall into three categories; aggregate level variables such as country-of-origin, individual level variables such as cultural orientation, and contextual variables such as group membership, the balance of power, and the type of communication that occurs between negotiation partners.; Two out-of-equilibrium behaviors are the focus of this dissertation; the propensities toward fairness and toward trust. Both fairness and trust have been shown in previous research to vary across cultures and negotiation contexts. I study fairness and trust using the methodology of experimental economics. In identical bargaining settings in each of the four countries, using real monetary incentives, I compare across cultures and negotiation contexts the extent of off-equilibrium play.; The key finding in this research is that culture, whether measured at the aggregate or individual level, plays the most significant role in determining the extent to which a negotiator will be cooperative or competitive. Furthermore, cultural orientation interacts with contextual factors, such as the balance of power or group identity, to produce different levels of fairness and trust across cultures in each negotiation setting.