Aspirations and Settlement

Abstract The legal-academic literature on litigation settlement describes a range of factors that affect settlement outcomes, but litigant “aspirations”—or ideal goals—are not among them. Negotiation scholars, however, routinely claim that high aspirations can improve bargaining outcomes. This article presents the “reference point theory of aspirations,” which reconciles these competing approaches by situating negotiator aspirations within the standard legal-academic model of settlement. Based on this theory, the article offers a series of hypotheses concerning the role of aspirations in settlement negotiations, and then reports the results of experimental tests that demonstrate the hypotheses to be plausible. Finally, in light of the reference point theory of aspirations, the article reconsiders the usual prescriptive advice offered by negotiation scholars that litigants always should set high aspirations for themselves in bargaining situations.