Rachel Croson

Rachel T. A. Croson is a behavioral economist whose research uses experimental methods to investigate cooperation, deception, negotiation, and the design of economic institutions. She is Provost and Executive Vice President at the University of Minnesota and holds the Presidential Endowed Chair in Economics. Her academic career has combined high-output empirical research with senior administrative leadership at multiple major American research universities.

Croson earned her PhD in economics from Harvard University, where she trained in experimental and behavioral economics. She has held faculty positions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas at Dallas (where she served as Dean of the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences), the University of Texas at Arlington (where she was Dean of the College of Business), and Michigan State University (where she served as Provost before joining Minnesota).

Her research has appeared in Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Management Science, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. She has produced influential experimental studies on contributions to public goods, gender differences in negotiation outcomes, the effect of asymmetric information on trust, and the behavioral foundations of economic exchange. Her work has shaped the use of experimental methods in economics, public policy analysis, and applied negotiation research.

Her co-authored 1999 paper with Maurice Schweitzer, "Curtailing Deception: The Impact of Direct Questions on Lies and Omissions," is among the most cited studies in the experimental literature on negotiations and remains a foundational empirical contribution to the study of deception in economic interaction. The paper demonstrated that direct questioning shifts the form of deception from active lying to misleading omission, a finding that has shaped how researchers, regulators, and practitioners think about disclosure and consent.

She has held leadership positions in the National Science Foundation, including service as Division Director for the Social and Economic Sciences. She has received multiple awards for research and teaching, including the Wharton Excellence in Teaching Award and recognition from the Economic Science Association.

Rachel Croson's work grounds Deception Destroys Trust. The treatise cites her co-authored 1999 paper with Maurice Schweitzer to establish that perceived dishonesty is one of the fastest and most potent destroyers of trust in any relationship.

Croson's distinct methodological contribution to that body of work is the experimental design that allows the boundary between deception and ordinary communication to be measured rigorously. Her research distinguishes between active falsehoods and misleading omissions and documents the trust consequences of each. Applied to AI, her findings imply that the design choice between making a system's nature obvious and allowing it to be ambiguous is not a stylistic question. It determines which class of communication users encounter, and the trust consequences of each are different and measurable. The principle's insistence on making AI obvious has its experimental support in her body of work.