Every day each of us compromise. Making concessions help people to keep in touch with other people. Nobody wants to spend time with someone who never makes concessions. Imagine, you are going to meet a friend somewhere and have a dinner with him/her and both of you want different places to go. Here we got a situation which needs a compromise to be solved. Because if one of you will not compromise (or maybe both of you) than the meeting is not going to happen. There can be several ways out of the situation: one of the friends must compromise, or they must choose totally different place - the one both of them are ok with - to have a dinner.
Among other psychological techniques of compromise there are two, kind of opposite techniques. For a better description I will explain them with an example. Imagine you need 20 dollars to buy a new T-shirt, but you have no money so you have to ask your mom. It has been proved that going directly to your mom and asking to borrow 20 dollars is less effective than using a technique of compromise called "ask big favor first and then smaller". So if you ask your mom to give you for example 100 dollars first, and probably after her negative answer you ask for 20 dollars (which was the only money you really needed) she will supposedly make a compromise after that first rejection she will give you 20 dollars. That's what the first technique is about.
Now, if you have used the second technique, which is called "ask small favor first and then bigger favor" would look like this: you need 20 dollars for a T-shirt, you go to mom and ask her 5 dollars, probably after the positive answer you neatly ask for another 15 dollars. Since she has already given 5 dollars to you she will likely do your second favor too. That's what the second technique is about.
Also there are some other techniques, but since this two are kind of opposites of each-other, I wondered which one was more effective than another. I had a supposition that the first technique would be more effective. The main reasons which made me think so are there: first, after being kind of rude (after rejecting someone's beg, one wants to be still a good person in other peoples eyes. And the next small favor, in comparison with the first big favor, is his/her chance to maintain an image of a good person. Also, the target has a contrast - after asking for such a big favor, the next smaller one seems even smaller. And the last argument - when one compromises, the other feel kind of charged, that he/she needs to compromise too, so he/she accepts doing the next smaller favor.
Regarding my interest I planned a research and tried to find out the answer for my question.
The research had two groups - we used different techniques (which were described upwards) with different groups. There were 20 people in each group all aged from 18 to 22. Gender balance was provided. As a research found out the difference was not big between effectiveness of those two techniques, but still, the first one - "ask big favor first and then smaller" was more effective (with 15%) than the second one "ask small favor first and then bigger favor".
In conclusion, these techniques are confusing. One might do something that he/she would not have done if there was not techniques of making concessions used. So, be careful, would you agree with doing it if they have not asked something else before which you denied to do. If you would not, then maybe stopping and thinking over would be better than just

About Author / Additional Info:
I study Psychology at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University