International commerce has always driven human progress. Its inherent cultural diversity has maximized the new ideas that improve consumers’ lives around the world. The best international business relationships are maintained over the long term and managed through inventive negotiation processes. Investments in time and money are required to build the trust and honest information exchange that allow for exploitation of mutually beneficial opportunities. This article provides a database and associated tools to help international negotiators understand the cultural differences that may impact buyer–seller relationships between parties from twenty countries and cultures including the United States and Iran.

Our study examines the effects of culture on negotiation behaviors and outcomes. We also explore how culture moderates the relationships between those behaviors and outcomes, a subject that has been neglected by most researchers. Our work integrates theories and methods from many areas of the behavioral sciences: marketing science, decision analysis, behavioral economics, game theory, social psychology, anthropology, sociolinguistics, linguistics, content analysis, and structural equations modeling. The data were created in a laboratory setting in which 1,197 businesspeople from 20 cultural groups participated in a three‐product buyer–seller negotiation simulation. In this article we first describe how our database was developed. Second, we look at how observed behaviors are associated with questionnaire‐derived negotiation processes and outcomes. Third, we develop a new tool for understanding cultural differences and use it to investigate how culture influences negotiation behaviors, processes, and outcomes across the 20 cultural groups included in our database.