Sam Swift

I am a 5th year PhD student in the Organizational Behavior group at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. I am currently on the academic job market, looking for a tenure track assistant professorship at a research-oriented university.

My research focuses on decision making, negotiation, and the ways that individuals stray from the strategies that would create the most value for their organizations and themselves. My work on selection decisions in organizations shows that firms fail to select the best personnel because they tend to choose candidates who benefited from favorable situations rather than those who excelled relative to their peers. My dissertation research shows how some negotiation strategies can backfire and negatively affect the value derived from a deal by influencing the negotiator's own beliefs. In these and other projects, I pursue a better understanding of where we go wrong in our decision making and what could be done differently to make ourselves happier and our organizations more successful.