Published April 14, 2026 in Strategy • 9 min read • 
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After winning the World Series in 2013, the Boston Red Sox wanted to keep hold of their long-serving star pitcher Jon Lester. The club could have been forgiven for thinking this would be a done deal. But Lester took their opening offer of about $70m over four years to heart. He cut off negotiations with the club he joined as a teenager. In 2015, after a brief spell with the Oakland Athletics, Lester joined the Chicago Cubs on a six-year deal worth $155m – and went on to win the 2016 World Series title. As the Red Sox found out, it doesn’t always pay to make the first move or to play hardball in an important negotiation.
Let’s imagine you’re about to enter into a negotiation. How do you approach it? Do you make the first offer or wait for the other side to show their hand? The managers in my classroom are typically split on this question: half want to seize the initiative, and half want to wait for their counterpart to suggest a figure. On the surface, negotiation science appears similarly divided. Earlier research told negotiators to make the first offer to claim more value for themselves. However, more recent studies show that first offers can backfire, damage relationships, and reveal too much information. We decided to delve deeper into decades of research to see whether it’s helpful to make the first offer and to do so ambitiously.
We found the real question when it comes to “winning” negotiations isn’t as simple as whether or not to go first. It’s about understanding when the benefits of making the first offer outweigh the costs.
Winning aggressively today might bring short-term gains, but it can damage your reputation and cost you future opportunities.
I joined a team of negotiation scientists, led by Hannes Petrowsky at Leuphana University in Germany, to find out more about the dynamics at play. We combined a meta-analysis of 90 studies with two new preregistered experiments. In total, we analyzed more than 18,000 negotiation simulations drawn from widely used exercises, covering situations such as buying a car, selling a house, agreeing on services, or allocating resources, and published the results in 2025 in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
We considered three different metrics:
Why choose these metrics? We didn’t just want to look at “who makes more money” because most negotiations are much more complex than that. Signing a contract is not the end of a negotiation; both parties still have to implement the deal, so goodwill matters. You might want to work with this person or company again, so pushing a hard bargain today can prove counterproductive if it means they won’t work with you tomorrow. Winning aggressively today might bring short-term gains, but it can damage your reputation and cost you future opportunities.
Here’s what we found: first offers can both help and hurt you. It all depends on the circumstances.
First offers have one big, consistent advantage, and – as confirmed in research by Brian Gunia and colleagues in 2013 – it shows up across cultures, even though most studies to date have been conducted in the West. Make the first offer, and on average, you will get more money, achieve better terms, and get more of what matters to you. How certain is this? Our meta-analysis suggests that first movers come out ahead in roughly 60% of negotiations. Furthermore, ambitious offers lead to better outcomes than moderate offers about 75% of the time. The anchoring effect is particularly strong when the negotiation is simple (few issues to be negotiated) and weakens when it becomes more complex.
Why? First offers anchor the negotiation to your advantage: once you put a number on the table, it shapes everything that follows. Research into real estate pricing by Gregory Northcraft and Margaret Neale, published in 1987, showed that your counterpart can’t help but gravitate toward your anchor, even if they think they are being objective. A second reason: making the first offer signals that you are not dependent on making a deal at all costs. Taking the initiative indicates that you must have alternatives and, therefore, communicates confidence and strength. Both mechanisms help you get more of what you want if you reach an agreement.
So far, the evidence might sound conclusive: you should always go first and go in hard. However, while making the first move often leads to an advantage, ambitious first offers can come at a heavy price. They increase the risk that you could sour the entire negotiation and walk away with nothing. In 2012, research I conducted with Gillian Ku, Cynthia Wang, and Madan Pillutla found that aggressive first offers are more likely to offend recipients and cause them to walk away. The anchoring benefit of a first move can only materialize if you reach a deal. Push too hard, and there’s no deal to anchor.
It gets worse. In research with Jeremy Yip, we found that expressing anger in negotiations is costly: when a negotiator displays anger, counterparts perceive the negotiator as selfish and prefer to walk away rather than reward selfishness (Yip & Schweinsberg, 2017). Our new experiments demonstrate a complementary, but distinct mechanism. We show that even when anger is not expressed, simply feeling angry, often in response to an ambitious first offer, increases the risk of an impasse.
This explains why, despite the evidence, so many seasoned negotiators say: “Never make the first offer.” They’ve seen deals collapse because someone pushed too hard. Those failures are hard to forget.
If it’s not as straightforward as throwing all caution to the wind to make that aggressive first offer, how can you assess when it is sensible to seize the initiative, whether or not to go big, and when it’s best to wait for your counterpart to make the opening gambit? Our research suggests that two factors shape when and how to go first: complexity and stakes. Understanding these factors and their implications should be key to determining your negotiation strategy.
Complexity refers to the structure and nature of the proposed deal. Is it a simple, single-issue negotiation (usually price), or is it a nuanced negotiation with multiple interdependent issues that require making trade-offs, such as a contract renewal with a long-term client or a salary increase related to a promotion?
In simple negotiations, the anchoring effects of a first offer are strong, meaning any initial figure inevitably becomes the reference point for the negotiation. If you are only negotiating on price, therefore, presenting the first offer will make a big difference to how the negotiation plays out. It will also heavily influence how your counterpart perceives you, with potential risks and costs to the relationship. Because simple negotiations usually involve only one key factor, such as price, there is limited flexibility to accommodate the other party’s preferences or maintain goodwill. That may not matter. Simple negotiations are more likely (not always) to take place with people you might never see again or care about – think buying a house, a car, or selling your company.
In complex negotiations with more to consider than just the price, the anchoring effects of a first offer weaken because more factors influence the outcome of a deal and how each party views the result. In this context, it becomes less certain whether an ambitious first offer will help you achieve your desired goal. Complex negotiations are also often embedded in a web of relationships: you are more likely to see each other again, and to care about the health of the relationship. The risks to the relationship from making the first move or being too aggressive, therefore, become more significant. For example, think of when you negotiate complex deals with long-term partners where the relationship matters, or with colleagues you will see again the next day, week, and year.
The stakes refer to the consequences and costs of a negotiation impasse or collapse. Say you don’t come to an agreement, what happens next? If an impasse means you’re going bankrupt, the stakes are high. If an impasse means you simply seek out another negotiation partner, you don’t need to worry about it too much. Do you want to maintain a positive relationship beyond this particular negotiation? In long-term relationships, triggering anger and damaging trust by making an aggressive first move won’t just kill this deal; it could harm future negotiations and jeopardize the entire relationship. In these kinds of negotiations, you should tread carefully when it comes to making the first offer, especially if you are considering tabling an ambitious figure.
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If you want to negotiate a favorable deal, it’s unlikely to be as simple as just being the one who is prepared to make a big, bold first move.
At this point, you’re probably wondering: OK, if I decide I do want to go first, what number should I suggest? In a 2023 study I conducted with Hannes Petrowsky, Burkhardt Funk, and David Loschelder, we analyzed over 26 million real-world negotiations on eBay. Not lab simulations but actual buyers and sellers, with real money on the line. We found that lower first offers anchored the final price in the buyers’ favor, but overly ambitious offers increased the risk of an impasse or no deal.
On average, the ideal buyer offer was around 80% of the seller’s list price. Low enough to anchor effectively; high enough to avoid walking away empty-handed. But context matters: depending on the product type, demand, and how much you care about closing versus getting the best price, that number ranged from 33% to 95%.
That range is very wide and, of course, eBay is different from many of the negotiations we face at work. So, how can you decide on a sensible plan of attack in your own context? We built a free tool based on data from the 26 million negotiations we analyzed in that study. Just enter the details of your situation at firstofferadvice.com, and it will suggest an ideal first offer: the sweet spot between anchoring effectively and avoiding an impasse. One caveat: this tool is based on marketplace negotiations, not more complex negotiations with your spouse, business partner, or C-level colleague. You will have to factor in those elements as you translate the data for your own situation.
If you want to negotiate a favorable deal, it’s unlikely to be as simple as just being the one who is prepared to make a big, bold first move. Doing so can trigger unwanted repercussions. A smarter approach involves weighing up whether the benefits of making the first move – as well as the magnitude of that move – are worth the risks to the outcome of the deal and the relationship. Effective negotiators treat first offers as a strategic instrument, not a default power play.
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