Journey to the bargaining table: Signaling, seeking, and screening

Negotiation scholarship has focused extensively on what happens at the bargaining table-how parties make offers, manage conflict, and reach agreements. Far less attention has been paid to how parties get to the table in the first place. In this article, we argue that the journey to the table deserves greater scrutiny. We organize pre-table dynamics around three behaviors: signaling (communicating whether and how negotiation might proceed), seeking (approaching a counterpart to propose bargaining), and screening (deciding whether to engage with or withdraw from a seeker). We review recent and foundational work bearing on each, identifying where the field has made progress and where significant gaps remain. These pre-table processes have important implications for negotiated outcomes, for negotiations that never occur, and for understanding how opportunity and bias operate before parties ever sit down together.