Race, Sexual Orientation, and Intersectionality in Distributive Negotiation Outcomes for Men

Negotiations have consequences for people’s career trajectories, wealth, and well-being. Yet we still have a limited understanding of how demographic characteristics such as sexual orientation and race influence distributive negotiation outcomes, much less the intersection of multiple marginalized identities. To contribute to (1) our understanding of how identity influences negotiations and (2) research on intersectionality, we test how race (Black versus East Asian versus White) and sexual orientation (gay versus straight) influence distributive negotiation outcomes for men in a field experiment. We conducted a large-scale ( n = 3,000), preregistered audit experiment involving (fictitious) buyers negotiating for cars on Craigslist. Sellers were 7.7 percentage points (22.4%) less likely to respond to gay versus straight White men. Sellers were also less polite in responses to Black and East Asian men (of any sexual orientation) than to straight White men. In a preregistered follow-up experiment ( n = 500), we show that impoliteness in negotiation responses reduces positive expectations about negotiations and behavioral intentions to negotiate in the future, suggesting that differences in politeness may have consequences for racial minorities’ willingness to initiate future negotiations. Our work illuminates how identity-based biases manifest in negotiations, offers insights into theories of intersectionality, and underscores how demand-side biases can lead to supply-side differences in negotiation propensity.