Research by Rebecca Hamilton and Wedad Elmaghraby The goal of business is to maximize profits, so it just didn’t make sense to researchers at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business why many retailers and suppliers sign deals that leave money on the table.

Research by Yue Maggie Zhou Flat organizational structures are popular in management literature. Leaders are urged to reduce the layers of management, on the theory that employees are more productive when they have more say in the decision-making process.

Research by Russell Wermers Hedge fund monitoring lag solved; breakthrough formula offers a new shield for institutional investments

Research by Sunil Mithas IT Flexibility Increasingly Drives Effective B2B Partnerships in Era of Cloud Computing and Big Data Major deals can fall apart when IT systems are inflexible, and the implications are significant for firms' strategies and competitive performance.

I remember a time when researchers who wanted to study human behavior had to use one-way mirrors and paper-and-pencil surveys. These days, my faculty don’t want to just ask people what they think of a product. They want to watch people use a product, and evaluate how they react to it.

When Larry Biess was recruited to CSX, he was only vaguely aware of the many facets of CSX’s day-to-day operations. Nearly two decades later, Biess is Director of Operations Support Systems at the $11.8 billion transportation company, which provides traditional rail service as well as the transport of intermodal containers and trailers.

Wedad Elmagrabhy, associate professor of management science, received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Her current research interests are the design of competitive procurement auctions in business-to-business markets and pricing in markets where buyers behave strategically.

Another Repatriation Tax Holiday? U.S. law makers should avoid, or at least restructure, giving American firms another tax holiday in attempts to get them to reinvest their foreign earnings domestically, according to research by Mike Faulkender, associate professor of finance. His findings show the reinvestment from tax holiday created by the 2004 American Jobs Creation Act (AJCA) – which cut the tax rate from 35% to 5% -- was marginal and primarily from smaller companies. Big firms applied very little repatriated funds to new investment.

On any given day, you might find a group of undergraduates in Van Munching Hall playing video games, eating snack foods or staring at computer screens. Don’t worry; these students aren’t slacking on their studies – they are helping Smith faculty with theirs. These types of experiments and many others are conducted almost daily in the Smith School’s Behavioral Laboratory. It’s the place to be for researchers wanting to find out how human behaviors influence decisions – everything from what people purchase, to the business deals they make, to how they use information technology.