When You Have Multiple Issues to Negotiate, Use “Nested Bracketing” to Create Maximum Joint Value
When you have multiple issues to negotiate, use nested bracketing: work through issues in small bundles, but deliberately connect those bundles before finalizing the deal. It helps you manage complexity without losing the cross-issue trade-offs that actually create value.
I have often told current and future leaders and managers: “Put more issues on the table. That’s how you create win–wins.”
Salary, bonus, timeline, scope, headcount, flexibility, reporting lines—bundle them all together and value will appear.
New research now tells me that sometimes that advice works.
And sometimes, it doesn’t.
A recent set of experiments by Majer and colleagues helps explain why multi-issue negotiations sometimes underperform—and what managers can do differently. The problem isn’t a lack of goodwill or creativity. It’s something more structural: a complexity–flexibility dilemma.
The hidden dilemma in multi-issue negotiations
Multiple issues do create flexibility. They allow trade-offs: I give on what I value less, you give on what you value less, and both sides win.
But multiple issues also create cognitive overload. When there are many moving parts, negotiators struggle to:
track priorities accurately
see which issues can be traded against which
notice value-creating combinations across the whole deal
The research shows a sobering pattern: performance improves when negotiations move from one issue to a few—but after about three issues, gains flatten and can even decline. More issues start hurting rather than helping.
Managers often respond to this overload instinctively—by simplifying.
Why “breaking the deal into parts” can backfire
A common coping strategy is to negotiate in chunks:
“Let’s lock in base salary and bonus first; we can discuss role scope and development later.”
“We’ll finalize cost and delivery dates now—customization and support can come once that’s settled.”
“Let’s agree on headcount and budget first; reporting lines and decision rights can follow.”
This approach—called subset bracketing in the research—reduces complexity by focusing attention on a small set of issues at a time.
And here’s the key insight:
This strategy works only when the best trade-offs sit within those chunks.
If the real win–win lies across chunks—say, base salary for role scope, or cost for customization—then negotiating in silos actively blinds both sides to value. The experiments show that in these cases, subset bracketing produces worse outcomes than tackling everything together, despite feeling more manageable.
In short:
Simplifying helps when value is local
Simplifying hurts when value is cross-cutting
So what’s the alternative?
Nested bracketing: structure without tunnel vision
The authors propose—and test—a more sophisticated strategy called nested bracketing.
Think of it as structured zooming:
Zoom in to manage complexity: work through small, meaningful bundles of issues so decisions remain cognitively manageable.
Zoom out to restore flexibility: deliberately integrate across those bundles before finalizing the deal.
Managers using nested bracketing don’t just move sequentially from one bucket to the next. They repeatedly ask, for example:
How does what we’re doing here affect options elsewhere?
What patterns do I see in what the other side concedes quickly versus resists?
Which issues might be traded across bundles to improve the whole deal?
Across six experiments, this approach consistently improved joint outcomes when integrative opportunities were scattered across issue clusters—precisely the situations where managers most often feel stuck or dissatisfied with “reasonable” agreements.
An example of nested bracketing
Consider a manager negotiating a job offer with a senior hire. Several issues are on the table:
Base salary
Bonus
Role scope
Reporting line
Remote work flexibility
Start date
To manage complexity, the manager first groups these issues into two bundles.
One bundle focuses on compensation (base salary and bonus).
The other focuses on role and work design (role scope, reporting line, flexibility, and start date).
Each bundle is discussed carefully, allowing both sides to express priorities without trying to resolve everything at once.
Before finalizing either bundle, the manager keeps early agreements provisional, reflects priorities back to the candidate, and proposes an explicit cross-bundle trade. From the discussions, it becomes clear that the candidate is relatively flexible on bonus size but cares deeply about role scope and flexibility, while the firm has limited salary flexibility but discretion over role design. Rather than closing compensation and role design separately, the manager offers greater autonomy and flexibility in exchange for a lower bonus or slower salary progression.
Issues were separated to make them easier to think about, but they were deliberately brought back together before the deal was finalized so that trade-offs across bundles remained visible.
That deliberate move—bracket first, then integrate—is nested bracketing.
Why nested bracketing works: insight, not cleverness
Interestingly, the advantage didn’t come from being more aggressive.
Nested bracketing worked because it improved insight into the other side’s priorities.
Managers using this approach were better at:
inferring what truly mattered to their counterpart
engaging in logrolling, that is, designing offers that traded low-value concessions for high-value gains
Once that insight improved, better deals followed—reliably.
The idea to remember
Nested bracketing is a simple rule for complex negotiations: bracket issues to think clearly, then integrate them to create value.
It allows managers to manage complexity without losing the flexibility needed to see and act on cross-issue trade-offs.
If a negotiation has many issues, the question isn’t whether to simplify—but how. Nested bracketing gives managers a way to simplify without becoming blind to value.
Personal note: At the moment, this is the only research article that directly studies nested bracketing. More work is clearly needed. That said, the logic is sound, the evidence is encouraging, and the cost of trying it is low. In complex negotiations, it’s a method worth experimenting with.
Reference: Zhang, H., Majer, J. M., Warsitzka, M., & Trötschel, R. (2025). Resolving the complexity–flexibility dilemma in multi-issue negotiations: Nested bracketing as a strategy to enhance negotiation outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology. Advance online publication. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/apl0001332
