She graduated summa cum laude from Indiana University-Bloomington with a BA in French, a BS in economics, and a BS in math. She was the Resident Scholar for the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation in Washington, DC. She obtained an MSc at The London School of Economics and Political Science in regulation. Her PhD in economics is from Stanford University. She then became an Assistant Professor of Strategy at Harvard Business School, where she taught the core strategy course and the strategy and technology elective course. Pai-Ling's research focuses on how firms compete in the presence of network effects.