The hyper-aggressive approach is riskier and leaves a lot of bad feelings among governing bodies and the community - but it has some merit. You avoid bargaining against yourself, you don't leave any achievable outcomes on the table, and you find out exactly where the limits/maxima are.

But aren't those short-term benefits? Once you have negotiated that way enough times, your counterparties learn that you are difficult to negotiate with and may start choosing not to negotiate with you at all. Projects get rejected out of hand rather than negotiated.

This also reminds me of poker play (from back when I used to play poker). A very effective strategy for players is to be aggressive in their betting until someone pushes back against them. Push them every time, and most of the time they'll fold - and even if there's a few times they push back hard against you, it's worth it for all the wins that lead up to it when they don't push back.

Again, this seems like it will only work in the short term. Once the other players learn that you constantly bluff, they simply start calling your bluff all the time.

I seem to recall some well-known developer in a large city who used this aggressive negotiating tactic consistently over a number of years. After a while no contractors in the city would work for him. They were squeezed so hard so often that working for this developer was not sufficiently profitable for them. So they simply refused to do business with him.

--Peter