Real estate industry experts will explore risks and opportunities in the sector at the 2025 Business Outlook meeting, hosted by Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Ethan Burris. McCombs alumni, the Dallas real estate community, and members of the media are invited. Registration is required.

The State of the Nation Project, a bipartisan collaboration of former appointees and advisors from the past five presidential administrations, released its first comprehensive "State of the Nation" report to shed light on how the United States is doing in key areas — the economy, education, health, the environment, civic engagement, trust in major institutions — compared to historical trends and peer countries. 

In a recent article published in the Journal of Marketing, researchers from the University of Vaasa (Finland), Arizona State University (United States), and Hanken School of Economics (Finland) offer a new perspective on how immersive services, such as residental care, affect consumer agency. Their discovery expands marketing theory and offers actionable implications for organizations to improve the service experiences of their customers. The researchers define immersive service as a service that consumers are embedded in and surrounded by, in the sense that their life experience is within the service and, in great part, constructed by it for some period of time. Consumers frequently experience immersive service in healthcare (e.g., hospital stays, residential care), education (e.g., school/university attendance) or hospitality (e.g., air travel, resorts) among others. 

Only a few people fundamentally oppose eating plant-based meat alternatives, a recent survey of 2,100 customers in the US shows. The study published in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" (PNAS) was conducted by marketing researchers from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), Humboldt University Berlin and Georg August University Göttingen. According to the results, the price of meat alternatives is the most decisive factor for their acceptance, while similarity to meat did not matter that much. Although, when both options were priced the same, respondents often favoured the animal product.