Education
PhD, Marketing, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, May 2006
M. Phil., Marketing, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, February 2004
EMBA, IAE Management and Business School, Universidad Austral, Buenos Aires, Argentina, December 1997
BA, Industrial Engineering, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina, September 1992
Primary Research Interests
Impact of decision making on consumers’ preference updating and subsequent
choices
Interpersonal influences on preferences and choice
Quantitative modeling of psychological processes
Scholarships and Awards
Haring Symposium Fellow, 2005
AMA-Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium Fellow, 2004
Rudolph Fellow, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University
2003-2006
Columbia University, Graduate School of Business Doctoral Fellowship,
2001-2003
IAE Management and Business School Ph.D. scholarship, 2001-2006
Best Foods EMBA scholarship, 1996-1997
Thesis Abstract: “The Bolstering Effect: Psychological Processes and
Consequences for Consumer Preferences
”The bolstering effect, or how people strategically distort their memories
and evaluations about past choices in order to justify them, is an important
phenomenon for consumer behavior and decision making. Previous literature has
shown the robustness of the effect and suggested its negative consequences for
consumer choice, consumer memory and learning from past experiences.
Surprisingly, little research has been done to disentangle the
psychological processes underlying the effect.
Prior research uncovered two sources of bolstering: choice-supportive
evaluative distortions and choice-supportive memory distortions.
Choice-supportive evaluative distortions refer to instances in which people
alter the valuation of their preferred alternatives in order to bolster their
choices. Choice-supportive memory distortions refer to instances in which people
distort their attributions (i.e., beliefs) about the source (i.e., the chosen or
the forgone product) of an attribute in order to bolster their choices.
In this dissertation, we bring an integrative view of the bolstering
effect. We present a parsimonious model to understand the psychological
processes underlying the effect and how it influences consumers’ preferences.
Our results show that choice-supportive memory for past options is driven by
biased information processing when consumers encode the information about
competing products, such that they pay more attention to their preferred
products; and by choice-supportive guessing at retrieval for not recognized
negative features, such that consumers are more likely to guess that a negative
feature belongs to the not chosen product than to the chosen one.
Consistent with the view that bolstering is a strategic mechanism used by
consumers to justify their choices, findings also showed that people bolster
attribute importance ratings based on their bolstered beliefs about chosen and
not chosen products only when they are highly confident about such beliefs.
Finally, we find that both sources of bolstering (i.e., choice-supportive memory
and choice-supportive evaluative distortions) play a role in shaping consumer
preferences for products’ attributes. We conclude discussing theoretical and
managerial implications and directions for future research suggested by our
findings.