Recent titles from Robert H. Smith School of Business faculty include: Dancing Elephants and Leaping Jaguars

Using a database of 130,000 Yelp reviews, Smith PhD student Jorge Mejia and two Smith professors have found a way to predict which Washington, D.C., restaurants will close. The technique, which grew out of Mejia’s dissertation, involves new software that can “read” and analyze the contents of online reviews.

Rajshree Agarwal, the Rudolph P. Lamone Chair and Professor in Entrepreneurship, has been named academic director of the new Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets.

Mind the Gap to Motivate Employees

Companies work fairly hard to place one woman — but only one — in a top management position, according to research by Cristian Dezső, an associate professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, and two co-authors. The article found evidence of a “quota” effect: Once a company had appointed one woman to a top-tier job, the chances of a second woman landing an elite position at the same firm drop substantially — by about 50 percent, in fact.

Teams searching for innovation increase their odds of driving the evolution of a field when they reach out to colleagues — or to research findings — outside their field's area of expertise, a new study from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business suggests.

Congratulations, you just got a stretch assignment! This means your boss trusts you and sees leadership potential. But beware. New research from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business shows potential pitfalls. The same assignment that can inspire engagement and critical thinking also can trigger self-doubt and anxiety.

It’s a truism in workplace: Psychology studies show that physically attractive people generally have an advantage. But new research from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business clarifies the mechanism through which attractiveness works as an advantage in one specific scenario — job interviews. More intriguingly, the research also shows when beauty can work against you.

Billionaire entrepreneur Michael Dell gave good advice when he returned to the University of Texas at Austin as commencement speaker in 2003. “Try never to be the smartest person in the room,” he told the graduates of his alma mater.