A Deal That Almost Wasn't
This story is fictional: I made it up. But this could have happened, and I even suspect more than a few people reading this will recognize themselves in it.
Sara had been through two rounds of interviews. She liked the company. The role was exactly what she had been looking for. When the offer came, it was $75,000, a little below what she had hoped for, but still worth pursuing. She wrote back asking for $85,000, a number she'd chosen because it felt ambitious enough to leave room for negotiations, not because it reflected what she actually needed.
On the other side of the table, Marc is a hiring manager, with a budget of $90,000. He had been authorized to go up to that number, and he thought Sara was the right candidate. But when her counter came in at $85,000, he did not say yes. He paused for a few days, worried that agreeing too quickly would signal he had more room. Then he came back with $78,000, framed as a "stretch" from his side. Because that is what you are taught to do in negotiations.
Neither number was true. Sara's real floor was $80,000, the minimum she would accept without feeling undervalued. Marc's real ceiling was $90,000. There was $10,000 of comfortable overlap between them. A deal that could have taken one honest conversation took two weeks, two rounds of written offers, one tense phone call, and a final handshake at $82,500, leaving Sara wondering if she had left money on the table. Marc had no idea he had nearly lost her entirely. He had gotten so caught up in the mechanics of the negotiation that his own ceiling had started to feel like something to push against, rather than a limit he actually had. In the end, he landed well inside his budget.
They got there. But something had shifted along the way. The relationship that should have started with mutual enthusiasm started instead with the inevitable suspicion that the other person had been playing a game.
They had been, of course. Both of them. When neither had needed to.
The Negotiation We Never Questioned
From a very young age, most of us received the same advice, in one form or another: don't show your hand. If they know, they'll use it against you. Our parents passed it down as wisdom, as the mature understanding of how the world actually works.
So we have integrated that being truthful means adopting a weaker position, one where we can be taken advantage of. And we enter every negotiation pre-decided to conceal.
The strange thing is, that might not be true. For years, I have tried the opposite approach. My opening move is an honest statement of the lowest terms I would accept. And surprisingly, that honesty often encourages the other party to try their best to make me happy. I found out that naivety, or what looks like naivety, can be disarming in a positive way. Not always, but more than you imagine.
And when it isn't, when someone takes my transparency as an invitation to push further, treating my honest floor as just a starting point to negotiate down from, I walk away. No deal, no second chance, and no regret. I have no genuine interest in doing business with someone who mistakes honesty for weakness. And as a side effect, maybe the best one, it became a very good filter. The people who responded well to it are the ones I have always been so happy to work with, and the others... well I don't know, but I never missed them.
The Pain of Naming Your Number
But I know the feeling. When I state my true floor, the minimum I'd genuinely accept, it feels, viscerally, like I'm opening at my worst plausible outcome. I can already see the upside I'm giving up, and it stings before the other side has even responded. If Sara had opened by revealing her honest minimum of $80,000, when every instinct tells her to ask for $90,000, it would already feel like she'd lost $10,000 before the negotiation had even begun. Doing the opposite, anchoring high, feels like starting with a win of the same amount.
There's a well-documented quirk in how humans process this. It is called loss aversion: we feel the pain of losing something roughly twice as intensely as we feel the pleasure of gaining the equivalent amount. The act of naming your real number triggers that response before the other side has said a word.
And then there's something else. When I name my real number, the one that actually reflects what I need or what I'm willing to pay, I am exposing myself to the other party. I'm saying: this is what I'm worth. This is the limit of what I can offer.
That exposure carries a social risk. What if my number is judged? What if the buyer winces at how little I need? Our numbers feel like they say something about us. And so we hide them, not only to gain strategic advantage, but to avoid the vulnerability of being seen.
This is especially true when there's a status dimension to the transaction. A junior employee negotiating salary with a senior manager. A freelancer quoting a large corporation. An artist selling to a collector. In these situations, exposing your honest limit can feel like confirming your subordinate position out loud.
The bluff, in the end, is both a tactic and a mask.
The Mirror Problem
And perhaps the most common reason we hide is that we assume the other person will hide too.
Mutual concealment is self-reinforcing. If I expect you to bluff, I would be naive to reveal my truth. So we both conceal. We have each internalized the same model of how negotiation works, and that model now creates the very behavior it assumes.
Game theorists call this an equilibrium: a state where neither party can improve their position by changing their behavior, given what they expect the other to do. The bluffing equilibrium is stable because stepping out of it, unilaterally, feels like a risk no one wants to take alone.
The tragedy is that both sides would often be better off if they could simply be honest with each other. But they cannot coordinate that. Someone has to go first. And going first, in a world trained to see honesty as weakness, feels like losing before the game has even begun.
Unless no one has to go first.
What if both sides revealed their true number at exactly the same moment, neither able to see the other's card before committing to their own? The risk of being exploited disappears. You don't need to trust the other person. You just need a structure that makes honesty safe for both sides. Such a structure would change everything.
What a Different Paradigm Looks Like
A while back I wrote about a simple mechanism: two people each state their honest boundary, the seller's true minimum and the buyer's true ceiling, in secret, with no chance to revise (There Might Be a Better Way to Agree on a Price). A geometric mean is calculated. If the numbers overlap, both sides split the value, not arithmetically but proportionally. If they don't, there's no deal.
More than the math and geometric mean, what struck me was how completely this mechanism changes the psychological position you're in.
In that structure, bluffing becomes irrational. If you overstate your floor to push the mean up, or understate your ceiling to pull it down, you risk killing the deal entirely. And you don't want to take this risk. The only move that consistently works is honesty. Not because the other side is trustworthy, but because the mechanism itself makes honesty your best strategy. You don't need to trust the other person, only the structure that makes the deal possible.
BidWix As the Trusted Structure
That structure exists. I built it, and I called it BidWix. Two parties, two bids submitted secretly with no chance to revise. A geometric mean calculated from both honest boundaries.
I built it because I was tired of the ritual. Tired of the bluffing, the anchoring, the posturing. Tired is not the right word. Let's be honest: I simply didn't like the game, because it's a game I was never good at.
If you're tired of deals that take days when they could take three minutes, or if you were never comfortable negotiating, you can try BidWix. It's a simple tool, built in the spirit of the early Internet. It's free, it respects your privacy, and it doesn't ask you to create an account (there isn't one).
Stéphane
P.S. If you’re wondering how this can be free without strings attached, I wrote a short note about that too: So, What's the Catch?.