Workers avoid negotiating compensation more because they believe employers are not open to it than because they don’t think they have the proper skills, according to researchers from Harvard, Brown and University of California Los Angeles.
The researchers conducted an experiment involving more than 3,100 job seekers in the U.S. tech sector, according to a white paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The job seekers were 31 years old on average, had seven years of work experience and made annual compensation between $217,000 and $221,000. Many worked for top tech companies like Google, Apple and Meta.
Workers were surveyed on past experience and beliefs about salary negotiations and then targeted with two different approaches. One received an “encouragement” treatment, which involved receiving a simple message like “companies expect you to negotiate” and “don’t feel guilty for negotiating.” The other approach offered workers a coaching option with a discount of more than 80% to help them improve their salary negotiation skills.
Among the first group who had received job offers within a period of several months, 61% countered their initial offer, compared to a control group of 54%. They received on average an increase in compensation of 12.45%, or equivalent to $27,000 annually.
In comparison, among the group who received the discounted coaching option, few took up the offer (only 3%, compared to 1% who received no discount). And even among those who received the coaching, it had “no meaningful effect on negotiation attempts,” the researchers said.
The results are surprising even among experts, the researchers found. They asked 117 academics to predict what would happen with their experiments, and “most predicted that the coaching treatment would be more effective than the encouragement treatment in increasing negotiation rates and compensation — whereas we find the opposite.”
More than half of workers don’t negotiate their salary, various studies have found. While the NBER white paper suggests they are leaving money on the table, a recent weakening of the economy — especially the tech sector — may be influencing job seekers’ habits.
More recent coverage of the study by UCLA Anderson Review noted that the job market has fallen in strength since the experiment was conducted (May 2023 through February 2025), and Ricardo Perez-Truglia, the participating UCLA researcher, said the “benefits (and risks) of negotiating compensation may rise or fall.”
According to data released by ZipRecruiter in April, fewer workers negotiated their offers or received signing bonuses in early 2025, and new hires were less likely to increase their pay or receive a counter-offer from their former employer.