Resolving the complexity-flexibility dilemma in multi-issue negotiations: Nested bracketing as a strategy to enhance...

Multi-issue negotiations present a complexity-flexibility dilemma: While multiple issues provide structural flexibility-offering opportunities for win-win agreements through variable-sum agreement options-they also entail structural complexity, requiring negotiators to process numerous trade-offs, concession patterns, and agreement alternatives. This research examines how negotiators navigate this dilemma by focusing on issue bracketing strategies-cognitive approaches for managing complexity by mentally grouping issues into subsets. Across six experiments (N = 1,602), we investigate how different bracketing strategies influence joint outcomes. We first examine subset bracketing, a widely used cognitive strategy that improves outcomes when it aligns with task flexibility-namely, when integrative trade-off opportunities are concentrated within subsets-but hinders outcomes when it misaligns, with such opportunities scattered across subsets. To address this limitation, we propose nested bracketing-a hierarchical information-processing strategy in which issues are organized into subordinate subsets to manage complexity and then integrated into a superordinate structure to preserve flexibility. Across studies, nested bracketing enables negotiators to recognize dispersed integrative trade-off opportunities by fostering insight into counterparts' priorities, thereby improving joint negotiation outcomes. This work clarifies when subset bracketing helps or hurts in multi-issue negotiations and introduces nested bracketing as an effective approach for managing complexity without sacrificing flexibility. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).