Exploring Multilingual Negotiation Support for English-Chinese Dyads: An Experimental Study

The increasing number of international negotiations involving multiple languages necessitates a growing reliance on multilingual support. Whereas empirical studies on negotiation support systems (NSS) have shown that NSS generally improve negotiation performance, no existing NSS caters for multilingual negotiations. With multilingual support, communication problems brought by the different negotiators´ cultures and languages are expected to be addressed. In this study, a negotiation support system with multilingual support was developed and a laboratory experiment was conducted to examine the impact of such support on six important dependent variables. Findings suggested significant effects of NSS support on individual outcome and joint outcome. Multilingual support helped to improve equality of outcome (under qualified conditions) but the time taken was significantly longer.