a b s t r a c tWe consider the bipartite unconstrained 0-1 quadratic programming problem (BQP01) which is a generalization of the well studied unconstrained 0-1 quadratic programming problem (QP01). BQP01 has numerous applications and the problem is known to be MAX SNP hard. We show that if the rank of an associated m×n cost matrix Q = (q ij ) is fixed, then BQP01 can be solved in polynomial time. When Q is of rank one, we provide an O(n log n) algorithm and this complexity reduces to O(n) with additional assumptions. Further, if q ij = a i + b j for some a i and b j , then BQP01 is shown to be solvable in O(mn log n) time. By restricting m = O(log n), we obtain yet another polynomially solvable case of BQP01 but the problem remains MAX SNP hard if m = O( k √ n) for a fixed k. Finally, if the minimum number of rows and columns to be deleted from Q to make the remaining matrix nonnegative is O(log n), then we show that BQP01 is polynomially solvable but it is NP-hard if this number is O( k √ n) for any fixed k.