Amid a sluggish holiday-season outlook for retailers – thanks to the likes of rising credit card debt and dwindling, post-pandemic savings, competition is intensified for shoppers who are looking to spend. Reflecting this, big retailers initiated their holiday-season discounts as early as October – well ahead of the traditional, day-after-Thanksgiving start to holiday shopping known as Black Friday.

There’s been some backlash to all of the attention the National Football League is giving to the assumption that singer-songwriter Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce are dating. Even Travis’ mom says she’s dealing with haters over it. Ever since Swift attended the Sept. 24 Chiefs-Bears game and then the Chiefs-Jets matchup the following Sunday, the NFL has capitalized off of the superstar power Swift appears to bring to everything she touches.

With two of the most prominent combat sports properties—WWE and UFC—now united under one belt, eyes are on parent company TKO Group Holdings for its plans to continue growing the brands moving forward. While the challenge of maximizing the adjacent brands’ marketing potential is seemingly difficult from the outside looking in, the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business’ Mary Beth Furst doesn’t expect TKO to struggle in grappling with the task.

Source: MBAGRADSCHOOLS. Edited for style.

Balaji Padmanabhan is among the earliest professors to bring machine learning into an MBA program. Sining Song’s research explores environmental-to-fintech-related factors in supply chain sustainability. And Agustin Hurtado recently analyzed 87 million minority-borrower accounts in a study showing minority bank ownership reduces information frictions and improves credit allocations.These professors are among the nine new tenure-track faculty members and three full time professional track faculty joining the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business this fall.

This article, by Dean’s Professor of Marketing Rebecca Ratner and co-researchers Ximena Garcia-Rada and Michael Norton, was originally published at The Conversation.

One of the world’s top schools for business research, Maryland Smith also is where students experience top-level teaching in a highly supportive community. Smith chronicles and celebrates this distinction at the end of each academic year by honoring its outstanding faculty and staff members with awards of excellence.Faculty Recognition AwardsJunior Researcher Award:Musa SubasiKunpeng ZhangOutstanding Researcher Award:Rellie Derfler-RozinPK Kannan

The recent overhaul of the federal policy on allocating deceased donor livers has not significantly improved geographical inequities and has led to a greater loss in viable organs, according to findings from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.