Device‐to‐device (D2D) technology has been extensively studied by virtue of its ability to reduce traffic load and communication delay while improving network performance. However, it is a challenging issue to simultaneously coordinate the energy efficiency (EE) and spectrum efficiency (SE) in D2D communications. In this paper, we investigate a multiobject optimization problem with conflicting criteria and propose a new solution paradigm to balance the EE and SE. Based on the ideas of multicriteria decision‐making method and bargaining game theory, we develop a new power control scheme for D2D communications. The major novelty of our approach is to strike a balance between the EE and SE through the developed multiple criteria bargaining process. The quantification of EE‐SE tradeoff is appropriately negotiated to reach a mutually acceptable agreement. Therefore, the proposed scheme selects the best power strategy that exploits the varying D2D communication conditions. To reduce the complexity, each individual D2D communication pair executes the power control algorithm independently and iteratively in a distributed manner. Therefore, the proposed scheme can be implemented with the acceptable polynomial complexity. Finally, extensive simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and outperformance of the proposed scheme over the existing state‐of‐the‐art protocols in terms of device payoff, D2D system throughput, and energy efficiency ratio. Our proposed multicriteria bargaining paradigm can be concerned to solve different kinds of multi‐object problem for various application scenarios.