Play · negotiation, told straight
Negotiation Dojo
Updated 2026-07-30 · Sources: 5 · One fictional scenario; every salary figure is an illustrative constant
Most people who lose money in a negotiation lose it in about four seconds, on a phone call, by being agreeable. This is one negotiation, six decisions long, against a hiring manager who is fair: she will not punish you for asking, and she will not give you a dollar you do not ask for. At every decision you can take the timid road, the prepared road, or the overreach. One of the overreaches is a bluff about a competing offer you do not have. It is available. It backfires, and the reason it backfires is the point of the exercise: negotiation is truth-telling that requires courage, and a bluff is the one move that cannot survive a follow-up question.
Predict first
Kestrel & Vance Freight will open at $82,000. Take that number without a word, or play all six decisions the way the research suggests. How far apart are those two outcomes in year-one pay?
Pick one, or skip the prediction.
The brief
The role: Operations Manager at Kestrel & Vance Freight, a fictional 140-person regional carrier. The posted band for the level: $80,000 to $92,000. The hiring manager: Dana Whitfield, who runs the operations team, has hired about thirty people, and is neither a pushover nor a shark. Every dollar figure on this page is a scenario constant chosen to be plausible; none of them is a measured average, and the source note below says so plainly.
Decision 1 of 6 · left on the table so far: $0
Recruiter, twenty minutes into a screening call
"Great, I think you'd get on well with Dana. Before we book the next round, let me ask the awkward one: what kind of number are you looking for?"
Screening call. You have not researched the market for this role yet. What do you say?
What is invented here and what is not. The company, the manager, the six decisions and every dollar amount are fiction, written to be plausible. There is no published figure for "how much a counter-offer typically moves an offer," so this page does not give you one; the $10,000 gap above is arithmetic on constants we chose, not a finding. What is measured: Hart, Bear and Ren (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2024; seven studies, more than 3,000 participants) asked hiring managers directly. They reported extending an average of 26.9 offers over their careers, of which 1.73 were withdrawn after a candidate negotiated, and said withdrawals usually followed rude or inappropriate behaviour rather than the asking itself (George Mason; paper; summary at Harvard PON). That is roughly one offer in sixteen: a real risk, not a zero, and smaller than most people fear. Galinsky and Mussweiler (2001) found the party who made the first offer obtained the better outcome, and that deliberately focusing on information inconsistent with an anchor erases that advantage (PubMed). Cullen, Pakzad-Hurson and Perez-Truglia ran field experiments with over 3,100 U.S. tech job seekers and found a light-touch encouragement to negotiate "significantly increased both negotiation attempts and compensation gains"; the abstract reports the direction, not a headline percentage, so neither do we (NBER 33903). For your own number, the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes median and percentile wages by occupation and metro area, free (BLS OEWS).
Lying lips are abomination to the LORD: but they that deal truly are his delight.Proverbs 12:22
KJV. The dojo lets you bluff a competing offer, and the bluff loses money, but that is not why it is ruled out. Proverbs 20:14 already sketches the haggler who runs down goods he knows are good and boasts about it afterwards: Scripture names the behaviour without commending it. Truth-telling is the constraint; courage is what makes it possible to tell the truth about what you are worth.