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.

Smart machines do many things better than humans, but Deloitte executive Bill Eggers has good news for workers worried about a robot apocalypse. “This very dystopian narrative that we see, there’s no evidence for it historically,” he said March 29, 2019, at the third annual Smith Analytics Consortium thought leadership conference at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. “In every other period of technological revolution, we’ve created more jobs than we’ve lost.”

Maryland Smith's Xian Gu, P.K. Kannan and Liye Ma, have been selected as a finalist for the 2018 Marketing Science Institute/H. Paul Root Award for their research paper, "Selling the Premium in Freemium." The award is given to a paper published in the Journal of Marketing that has made a significant contribution to the advancement of the practice of marketing in a calendar year.

Deloitte hosted seven faculty affiliates of the Smith Analytics Consortium for a meeting of the minds on Jan. 31, 2019, at the company’s Greenhouse in Washington, D.C.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – What could be better than free? For companies with a freemium business model – Spotify, Dropbox, Hulu and The New York Times are examples – it’s a key question. Can a company increase its number of paying customers when a free version is available? And if so, how?

Twitter can be a brutal world for customer service workers. Complaints about companies are not just public but often harsh: “Sitting on the Tarmac at DFW waiting for a gate! Late again #americanairlines.”

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Twitter can be a brutal world for customer-service workers, since complaints get aired not just with great vitriol but also very publicly. All companies take virtual punches to the gut, and they have to decide how to respond.

A recent CBC Music report holds up music bands as models of good Tweeting skills, citing Atlanta rapper Waka Flocka Flame as one example with 1.3 million followers. “@wakaFlockabsm has something for everyone,” the report says. “Fun interactions with fans, inspirational quotes and weird hashtags.” Social media has become increasingly important for musicians to engage fans, promote output and subsequently lift record and concert sales — a dynamic analyzed in a recent study from the Smith School.

The Smith School is happy to welcome the following new professors to the school: Accounting & Information Assurance Hanna Lee Derek Johnson Decisions, Operations & Information Technologies Tunay Tunca Inbal Yahav Ilya O. Ryzhov Pamela Armstrong Ilchul Yoon Rui Zhao