SMITH BRAIN TRUST — The car you rented as part of your auto-share club reeked of cigarette smoke and a cross-country roadtrip worth of crumbs littered the seats and floor. There was a slight and mysterious stickiness on the gear shift. It made you wonder: Why are some vehicles in the car-sharing club kept meticulously tidy while others arrive icky?

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — With lenient return policies common, about 9 percent of purchases at brick-and-mortar stores are returned and 25 percent to 30 percent of online orders are sent back yearly in the United States. Where do these items end up? In many cases, the likes of market vendors, wholesale liquidators, eBay Power sellers, and "mom and pop" stores purchase the goods via online auctions and resell the merchandise.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Could activism inspired by International Women's Day, such as State Street Global Advisors' placing a statue of a young girl before the iconic charging bull of Wall Street, actually hamper the push to gain more women on U.S. corporate boards?

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Corporate gender gaps have narrowed in recent years, but men continue to dominate high-level positions. Among Fortune 500 companies, for example, women held only 20 percent of all board seats in the 2016 Board Diversity Census published Feb. 6, 2017, from the Alliance for Board Diversity in partnership with Deloitte.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — It was never an easy marriage. Now General Motors and its European operations are officially calling it quits, laying bare their incompatibilities and the difficulties of bridging the cultural divide.

Two board members at the University of Maryland’s Center for the Study of Business Ethics, Regulation and Crime (C-BERC) were profiled in the Women Leading Research initiative at the Robert H. Smith School of Business. Congratulations to Christine Beckman for her work on risks and rewards for multidisciplinary work and Leigh Anenson for her work on ways to save government pensions. 

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — When employees break the rules at work, it might not be mischief. It might be monotony. A new study finds that employees whose tasks are organized in a more routine and repetitive way are more likely to fall prey to ethical lapses and break rules to make their workday easier. But there's good news. The researchers found that shaking up the order in which employees perform tasks — even without changing the tasks themselves — can reduce rule-breaking.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — People who study financial economics regularly assume that the markets in which firms sell their products are perfectly competitive, or alternatively that firms operate in isolation. This all-or-nothing thinking is unrealistic.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — The gender pay gap, widely cited for full-time workers in the United States as women earning 79 percent of what men earn, drew 100 businesses to sign on to the White House Equal Pay Pledge in 2016. It also prompted professor Margrét Bjarnadóttir at the University of Maryland’s Robert H.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Researchers can discover creative solutions to complex problems when they combine know-how from different disciplines, but they should understand the potential penalties involved. A new study, co-authored by Christine Beckman at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, shows risks and rewards for multidisciplinary research.