Dangerous deception? Advancing the knowledge on buyer-supplier negotiations

Nowadays, the purchasing function constitutes a key player in the quest for competitive advantage. Consequently, the importance of buyer‐supplier negotiations is rising sharply – and so does firms’ vulnerability to deceptive behavior by suppliers. This paper’s objective is to help supply managers understand, anticipate, and mitigate deception. Using eight studies and a participant pool of more than 700 sales and purchasing professionals, it obtains crucial new insights into deception. It assumes a holistic perspective by covering various industries and investigating both the deceiver, the deceived, and the situational characteristics surrounding them. After delineating two types of deception – bluffing and lying – from each other, the paper demonstrates that bluffing, unlike lying, is not detrimental to buyer‐supplier relationships. Behavioral negotiation experiments then demonstrate that employees of new ventures are more likely to encounter deception, and that ethics instruments meant to curb deception mitigate lying, but are ineffective against (or might even promote) bluffing.