We introduce our commentaries with two articles on the impact of President Donald Trump’s approach for negotiation theory, which refers to the body of scholarship that attempts to develop explanations from research findings on negotiating behavior. Dean Pruitt first describes Trump’s general approach to negotiation. Trump’s experiences, Pruitt argues, point to some undeveloped areas of negotiation research and theory worth studying, including the timing of entry into a negotiation and its impact on the outcome, the transferability of expertise, and tactics not used by previous American presidents.
In their essay, Joel Cutcher Gershenfeld, Robert McKersie, and Richard Walton focus on the rules of the negotiating game, the “negotiations about how to negotiate,” that are typically established during pre‐negotiation meetings or by long‐standing norms. They ask whether outcomes are improved or worsened by the kinds of tactical disruptions in these norms that Trump seems to favor with his unilateral approach.
