Costello Research Careers

Two Costello College of Business accounting professors are exploring how inherent personal traits may influence business success—and their early findings will gratify the left-handed among us.

Post-Covid complaints about “Zoom fatigue,” work-life imbalance, etc. belie a deeper longing for what was lost in the transition to remote work.

Thanking someone in advance for something you’re asking them to do increases their motivation and commitment to the task. This savvy managerial technique also raises some tricky ethical questions.

If you’re nervous about negotiating a starting salary, that’s because your mind is playing not one, but two tricks on you. A George Mason management prof explains how to undo the mental spell.

Sarah Wittman, an assistant professor of management at Mason's Costello College of Business, unpacks this complex problem and proposes some potential research-based solutions.

When it comes to relationships between co-workers, organizations’ stated priorities must match what’s happening under the hood.

Negotiation is a critical skillset in business and in society. Negotiation is a complicated, joint decision problem where parties can, potentially, make each other better off—but also have some competing interests. Einav Hart, assistant professor of management at George Mason University, suggests that our relationships and context influence how we should negotiate—and even whether it is a good idea to negotiate at all.

In the earliest stage of innovation, creative proposals are judged according to their perceived novelty and usefulness. Sharaya Jones, assistant professor of marketing at Mason, has a simple yet counterintuitive rule for would-be innovators hawking their ideas: More is more. Her recent paper in Marketing Science, co-authored by Laura J. Kornish of University of Colorado Boulder, pits verbose and detailed idea descriptions against terse ones.

Einav Hart, an assistant professor of management at George Mason University’s School of Business, shows the economic implications of negotiators’ relationships, and how these economic implications affect how people negotiate. Her recent paper in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (co-authored with Maurice Schweitzer at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania) introduces the construct “ERRO” (the Economic Relevance of negotiators’ Relational Outcomes) to shed light on when negotiators should consider their future relationships.