Professor Croson received her PhD from Harvard University in 1994. After 15 years in academic administration, including as Executive Vice President and Provost at the University of Minnesota, Dean of the College of Social Science at Michigan State University, Dean of the College of Business at UT Arlington and Division Director of Social and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation, in 2025 she returned to the faculty in the Economics Department at the University of Minnesota.

Her research has focused on the voluntary provision of public goods (especially donations to public radio), bargaining and negotiation, behavioral operations management, and gender and cultural differences. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation as well as foundation and corporate grants, and published in journals in multiple disciplines, including economics, management and business, and other related social sciences.

She has served as Associate Editor / on Editorial Boards of the American Economic Review, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Management Science, Experimental Economics, and Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization as well as on numerous funding panels (National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health). She was pivotal in creating and leading workshops to help female junior faculty in Economics advance through the profession, winning the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economic Association (2017) and the American Economic Association Distinguished Service Award (2024) in recognition of her contributions. 

Professor Croson was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in 2021.