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El propósito del Seminario de Negocios es convertirse en el lugar donde presentar nuevas investigaciones, así como, también, en un foro para aumentar el conocimiento mutuo entre los miembros del profesorado. 

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Abstract:
Everyone experiences significant life events, and negative life events (NLEs) can be particularly disruptive to a person’s life. However, existing research has not addressed how relationally disruptive NLEs like divorce or death of a loved one influence consumption and spending habits. Since people derive meaning from their social connections, relationally disruptive NLEs might shift consumption behavior toward products that offer eudaimonic value, reflecting a search for deeper meaning. We investigate this hypothesis in two longitudinal datasets of U.S. households’ purchase data. Using difference-in-difference models and propensity score matching, we find that households experiencing such NLEs spend more on products high in eudaimonic value. The effect is robust during both ordinary (Study 1) and extraordinary times (i.e., a global pandemic: Study 2). A follow-up experiment addresses endogeneity concerns by providing a causal replication of these effects, and reveals search for meaning as the underlying mechanism, ruling out competing accounts. These findings contribute to prior literature on life events and meaning in consumption, and offer key managerial implications for category management and retail strategies.

Keywords: negative life events; eudaimonic products; meaning; panel data; difference-in-difference.


Dr. Elena Fumagalli is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at INCAE Business School, formerly holding the same position at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. She earned her Ph.D. in Marketing from HEC Paris, France, and a Master's in Marketing Management from Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan, Italy, where she graduated cum laude. Dr. Fumagalli also spent a year as a visiting doctoral student at Texas A&M, Mays Business School.
Professor Fumagalli specializes in consumer well-being, particularly loneliness and technology/social media use. Her research focuses on consumer behavior, using both experimental design and survey methods to investigate how negative emotions like loneliness and disgust influence purchasing decisions.
Her work has been published in various top-tier international journals, including the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Retailing, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, Frontiers in Psychology, and Current Opinion in Psychology.
As a marketing consultant and active researcher, she has been invited to participate in workshops, doctoral colloquiums, and conferences in different countries. In December 2022, she addressed the topic "Covid-19, Vaccine Brand Preference, and Political Orientation" at the Strategic Management in Latin America Conference in Buenos Aires.
In 2022, she participated in the ¡Compórtate! podcast by Behavioral Insights (Argentina), discussing consumer behavior. That same year, she was interviewed by the Argentine newspaper La Nación on the topic "Distraction, a Modern Malaise Putting Technology in the Spotlight."
Throughout her academic and professional career, she has received several accolades, including third place in the Best Undergraduate Course Professor category at Di Tella Business School (2022), a fellowship from the Global Colloquium on Participant-Centered Learning at Harvard Business School, and the Editor’s Choice Award for Marketing from SAGE in 2021.