Effective negotiators seek opportunities to create value. By making tradeoffs across issues, parties can obtain greater value on the issues that are most important to them. But how can you be sure you’re making the right offer?

Victoria Husted Medvec and Adam D. Galinsky of Northwestern University argued that, in negotiations involving many issues, you can create a great deal of value by making multiple equivalent simultaneous offers or MESOs. This strategy entails identifying several proposals that you value equally and presenting them to the other side.By making multiple offers, the theory goes, you appear more flexible, collect information about the other side’s preferences based on which offer she likes best, and increase the odds of reaching agreement.