She studies how factors such as culture, reputations, and negotiator mobility influence how people negotiate and how they manage conflict. She also looks at how near-miss events bias perceptions of risk and how these biases instantiate themselves in individual and organizational decisions regarding low probability, high consequence events such as: natural disasters, man-made disasters (terrorist attacks), and organizational disasters (oil spills and space flight mishaps). She has served on the editorial boards of numerous publications. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.