••• consumer psychology
We’re sold on no-haggle buying
Would you pay more for a car just to skip the negotiation process? According to research by David Hunsaker, clinical associate professor of management at the IU Kelley School of Business Indianapolis, many Americans would – and do. “Across five studies, we found that 95% of individuals chose not to negotiate up to 51% of the time,” Hunsaker says.
The project spanned large-scale experiments exploring why people avoid negotiating and what it costs them, examining: how often individuals forgo negotiation opportunities; the minimum savings people need to justify negotiating; how much extra people will pay to skip negotiating; and whether interventions, such as utility comparisons or social norm prompts, can reduce avoidance.
“We framed this research around a simple question: When you have the chance to negotiate, will you?” Hunsaker says. “Even in traditional contexts like buying a car, companies now advertise ‘no-haggle pricing’ as a selling point. Businesses can raise prices by 5% to 11% and more than half of consumers will pay it.”
The research also revealed that people judge negotiation value by percentage saved, not the absolute dollar amount. “On average, participants needed savings of 21% to 36% of an item’s price before considering negotiation worthwhile,” Hunsaker says. “This shows that decisions are driven by perceived proportional value, not absolute dollars.”
The research, published in Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, was conducted by Hunsaker in collaboration with Hong Zhang of Leuphana University and Alice J. Lee of Cornell University.
••• the business of research
See my point?
Next time you’re presenting research findings, make sure your hand gestures match the material you’re talking about.
For their Journal of Marketing Research article, “Express: Talking with your hands – how hand gestures influence communication,” Giovanni Luca Cascio Rizzo, assistant professor of marketing, University of Southern California, and his co-authors analyzed thousands of TED Talks. They found that movements that visually represent the idea a speaker is talking about (which they call “illustrators”) can shape and improve an audience’s understanding, giving listeners a visual shortcut to a presenter’s meaning and helping abstract ideas feel more concrete. This makes messages easier to process (in what psychologists call “processing fluency”) and when people to see a speaker as more competent and persuasive, their ideas feel easier to grasp.
Rizzo advises to focus on clarity over choreography. Think about where your hands naturally illustrate what you’re saying – emphasizing size, direction or emotion – and let them move with purpose. Make sure the movements match the message – avoid random waving, fidgeting or pointing to things in space.