The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently replaced its food pyramid nutrition guidelines with a user-friendly plate icon to help Americans understand the proportions of foods they should be eating each day for a healthy diet. In this edition of Smith Business Close-Up with the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, Dr. Rebecca Ratner talks about how her research supports the new nutrition guidelines.

Flight Delays Cost Passengers Billions Mike Ball, Orkand Corporation Professor of Management Science, associate dean of research, and co-director of the National Center of Excellence for Aviation Operations Research (NEXTOR), published a study showing that in 2007 passengers traveling by plane were delayed by more than 28,000 years, costing them $16.7 billion in lost time. In total, flight delays in the United States cost $32.9 billion each year.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently replaced its food pyramid nutrition guidelines with a user-friendly plate icon to help Americans understand the proportions of foods they should be eating each day for a healthy diet. In this edition of Smith Business Close-Up with the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, Dr. Rebecca Ratner talks about how her research supports the new nutrition guidelines.

Life is full of decisions – sometimes tough ones– but those decisions can be made easier for informed consumers and savvy marketers. In this edition of Smith Business Close-Up with the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, Rebecca Ratner, associate professor of marketing, talks about her how people can make better decisions and the ways in which they can be persuaded toward a particular decision.

Thursday, June 11, 2009, 7:30 p.m.Sunday, June 14, 2009, 7:30 a.m.Monday, June 15, 2009, 4:30 a.m. Life is full of decisions – sometimes tough ones– but those decisions can be made easier for informed consumers and savvy marketers.

Research by Rebecca Ratner

“When people do things alone, they enjoy themselves more than they expected,” Maryland Smith research finds. “People overestimate the benefits of being with someone else.”

Why are World Series tickets so popular, even among people who don't consider themselves Nats fans? The principles of scarcity are at work here, a Maryland Smith expert explains.

Consumers make more hedonic choices when their preferences are visible to others, so that they can promote the image that they are having fun — whether or not they really are.

Maryland Smith faculty share their best travel hacks, from traveling early to the best ways to tolerate traffic, to make your holidays easier.