Setting specific, challenging, and difficult goals result in greater profit than does setting easy or nonspecific goals. Nonspecific or easy goals lead to suboptimal, compromise agreements. High aspirations exert a self-regulating effect on negotiation behavior. Negotiators who are assigned easy goals tend to set harder new goals; however, in spite of adjustments, their new goals are are significantly easier than the goals chosen by the difficult-goal negotiators. Thus, it is to a negotiator's advantage to set a high, somewhat difficult aspiration point early in the negotiation. In one investigation, negotiatiators who set goals that were extremely difficult achieved better negotiation outcomes.