Publications

Published work

1. The effect of job loss on risky financial decision-making. Hirshman, S. D., Sussman, A. B., Vazquez-Hernandez, C., O’Leary, D., & Trueblood, J. S. (2025). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(1), e2412760121.

Abstract: Job loss is a common and disruptive life event. It is known to have numerous long-term negative effects on financial, health, and social outcomes. While the negative effects of becoming unemployed on health and well-being are well understood, the influence of job loss on financial decisions has received little attention. Across a large-scale survey (), spending data from a bank (), and two online experiments (total ), we find that job loss increases financial risk-taking. First, in survey data, job loss is associated with elevated levels of self-reported financial risk-taking and lottery ticket purchases. Next, using administrative data from a large bank, we find consistent causal evidence of the influence of job loss on gambling spending. Although total spending decreases after job loss, gambling spending is less affected than our control categories. Finally, we turn to two incentive-compatible manipulations of job loss operationalized in a lab setting. We find that this experimental manipulation increases the take-up of financial risks. The current finding that job loss increases financial risk-taking could accentuate long-term negative financial effects of job loss.

2. How Do Stereotypical Representation Affect Judgments of New Product Success: An Empirical Investigation. Vazquez-Hernandez, C., Garbuio, M., & Szkudlarek, B. (2024). IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management.  Special issue "Cognitive Biases and Heuristics in the New Product Development Process: A Call for More Empirical Evidence").

Abstract: Storytelling about success is a compelling strategy for communicating a new product’s features, both internally to gain the support of key decision makers and externally to gain support for market launch. Yet, new product success stories often lean more toward stereotypes than facts, casting doubt on their accuracy and representativeness. This study examines the accuracy of innovation managers’ judgments about new product success rates when faced with stereotypical information. We specifically explore the influence of the representativeness heuristic, hypothesizing that it leads managers to rely on stereotypical information and potentially results in erroneous judgments. Through two experimental studies, we assess how the valence and amount of information impact judgment accuracy. Our findings indicate that both factors predominantly drive intuitive judgments, which can be less accurate than deliberation. Additionally, we discover that a manager’s level of expertise moderates this relationship. Even expert innovation managers, when influenced by stories about potential new product success, tend to disregard factual data about past success rates. These findings offer critical insights into how reliance on stereotypical representations can skew innovation managers’ judgments about new product success.

3. Closer than ever: Growing business-level connections between Australia and Europe. Choy, S. B., Davis, T., Ding, H., Gao, M., Garbuio, M., Hardy, C., ... & Wu, E. (2023). Closer than ever: Growing business-level connections between Australia and Europe. European Management Journal, 41(2), 181-190.

Abstract: Despite the growing presence of European firms in Australia and vice versa, studies of these business-level connections have been few and far between. Building on points made in our earlier macro-level analysis of Australian-European relations, this study examines business-to-business and business-to-consumer activity at the micro-level between the two continents. We focus on three themes illustrative of these growing business-level relations. First, we examine the different pathways taken by Australian businesses in their quest to develop a European market presence. Second, we discuss instances of business and technological innovation in the Australian context, including stories of success in digital innovation and university-corporate collaboration as well as cautionary tales for European institutions arising from the Australian experience. Third, we compare and contrast how Australian and European businesses have responded to the challenge of climate change, focussing on the issues of green lending and retail insurer performance. In foregrounding these three themes, we offer reflections on the implications and lessons for the growing number of businesses operating across both continents.

4. The Recognition Heuristic in Innovation Management: An Experimental Pilot Study on Fast and Frugal Heuristics for Promoting Innovation. Vazquez-Hernandez, C. (2023). The Recognition Heuristic in Innovation Management: An Experimental Pilot Study on Fast and Frugal Heuristics for Promoting Innovation. Available at SSRN 4405504.

Abstract: Intuitive decision making is a topic that has generated contrasting views due to the perceived trade-off between casting speedily AND accurate judgments. While cognitive psychologists have provided evidence suggesting that human intuition might lead to erroneous decisions, fast and frugal heuristics researchers have countered this view by presenting evidence showing that heuristics can indeed lead to fast and accurate decisions. Particularly, when the recognition heuristic is being accessed. The research on the recognition heuristic proposes that individuals can make accurate decisions when they are exposed to a reference class they know. However, little work has been done on the use of the recognition heuristic in the applied field of innovation management, which is important due to the inherent uncertainty involved in managing innovation. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate whether the recognition heuristic, as one of the building blocks of intuitive decision making, can help managers make accurate and fast decisions in innovation management. This paper reports on the results of three pilot experiments, a qualitative exploration, and a dispositional decision-making questionnaire where the recognition heuristic is applied in situations like those encountered when launching new products. This is a stage of innovation is relevant because new product launches tend to fail due to poor decision-making approaches. The evidence presented in this research suggest that the recognition heuristic can drive accurate intuitive judgments when selecting the best channel to launch a new product in market. It explores how the use of the recognition heuristic varies across groups of participants (N=44) and highlights the affordances of using intuition as a knowledge application strategy when managing an innovation project. 

5. IT FEELS RIGHT! Intuitive decision making in innovation management: A systematic review, and empirical evidence at the commercialisation stage of innovation. Vazquez Hernandez, C. A. (2020). IT FEELS RIGHT! Intuitive decision making in innovation management: A systematic review, and empirical evidence at the commercialisation stage of innovation (Doctoral dissertation, University of Sydney).

Abstract: My research aims to explore the role of intuitive decision making when commercialising new products. My motivation is to understand how intuitive decision making happens at the commercialisation stage of innovation. Specifically, I aim to identify what heuristics drive intuitive decision making at this stage, and how. I do this to provide evidence for one of the most prominent decision-making heuristics (i.e., the representativeness heuristic), and how it precedes intuitive decisions in the categorisation of expected new product success in the market, which is key when commercialising innovation. I focus on this stage of innovation management because this is where most innovations fail. I conduct two experimental studies to investigate whether positive and negative (valence of representative information) and less or more information (amount of representative information) affects probabilistic decision making intuitively or rationally, and whether expertise (argued to enable better intuitive decisions) moderates this relationship. In the first stage of this experimental study I conduct a pilot study with N=27 participants to ascertain a cause–effect relationship between valence and amount of information, and intuitive decisions. In the second stage, I increase the sample to N=112 participants divided into three experimental groups (i.e., innovation managers, other managers, and students) to understand whether innovation expertise is a moderating factor for making intuitive decisions. Additionally, I conduct a concept analysis of answers provided by all experimental participants to an open-ended question to ascertain how they self-declared the role of intuition in making innovation decisions. I also use a dispositional decision-making questionnaire to ascertain whether each participant sees themself as more intuitive or rational when making decisions. I found that most participants believe that intuition has a role to play when making decisions in innovation. Further, the experimental results reveal that valence and amount of information drive intuitive decisions about the categorisation of new product success, and that expertise moderates this relationship. Overall, these findings provide scholars with new empirical evidence about the antecedents/heuristics behind intuitive decision making. For practitioners, it provides an understanding of some of the "rules of thumb" utilised when commercialising an innovation project, and whether these rules result in biased decision making that leads to erroneous decisions.

Work in progress (incl. under development and under review)

1. Decision-Making Experiments in Innovation Management: A Primer (under review)

Abstract: Experimental research designs are key to understand relationships of causality but have been seldom used in innovation management research. This is evident, for example, when investigating decision-making in the management of innovation. Although there are a few studies researching decision-making in innovation management from an experimental vantage point, the systematic knowledge behind designing experiments in the field is yet to be discussed and contextualised. Currently, scholars can access different guides from other disciplines for how to design experiments. However, one that is reflective of the unique challenges of researching decision-making in innovation management is missing. This is surprising because without such a guide, conducting decision-making experiments in innovation management with rigour, replicability, reliability, and falsifiability might be ambiguous. This methodological manuscript provides clear directions for how to design experiments for the study of decision-making in innovation management. It shows that experimental research is complementary to current exploratory and descriptive research, and explains why experiments are particularly appropriate to answer research questions of causality. It especially focuses on exposing key dimensions needed to conduct a robust experimental investigation, and exemplifies throughout the document how these could be implemented in the study of decision-making in innovation management. This manuscript contributes to the field of innovation management research by providing a perspective of how its cognitive and behavioural aspects could be scientifically investigated and measured through experimental research designs. Further, it contributes by providing an experimental method lens through which other cognate fields conducting experiments can be viewed.

2. Augmented Judgements: The affordances of artificial intelligence in improving accuracy of new product launch decisions.

Abstract: The uncertainty behind new product in market makes judging its success a complex endeavour. The extant literature does not accurately explain whether with the help of an artificial intelligence (AI) such uncertainty can be managed. In our paper, we aim at measuring to which extent new product success judgments improve when information provided by an artificial intelligence model is present. We conducted three pilot experiments to measure the effects of different amounts of information given by the artificial intelligence. In the first experiment, participants are presented with the AI’s predicted probability of success. In the second experiment, participants are presented with AI’s probability of success coupled with an explanation how the AI reached its predictions based on variables of the product. In the third experiment, we measured participants improvement on their own judgments after (not while!) being exposed to the information provided by AI. We use new wine products as a context for the experiments. Ground-truth for success is based on a large database of historical product launches. Participants were recruited via a panel, and exposed to new product launch scenarios in an online service. We found that the predicted judgments are significantly improved (p-value: 0.011) when AI information is provided. We also found that participants significantly improved (p-value:0.05) after receiving the AI stimulus. However, we did not find strong evidence that exposing participants to an explanation is better than exposing them to just a probability of success. With our pilot experiments, we also identified required samples sizes and modifications in the experimental design to increase statistical power. Our findings contribute with empirical evidence on the affordances of AI in improving new product success judgments, and the effect of applying novel AI explainability techniques in real-world users. Further, our findings pave the way for further experimentation in human-AI interaction for augmenting new product judgments.

3. The Essential Building Blocks of Creative Green Innovation: Micro foundations for Successful Innovation Teams

Abstract: Innovation scholars often mention the idea of creativity as a “necessity” for green innovations, but rarely provide what this “necessity logic” means theoretically or empirically, particularly when it comes to identifying the necessary microfoundations of innovative teams that want to develop new green products and patents. This shows a key problem in creativity and innovation research. Without understanding which microfoundations are necessary for teams to create green patents, efforts to create the next generation of products and services are likely to be erroneously applied because the most critical factors to increase the probable success of an innovation might not be present. However, successfully identifying the necessary microfoundations will allows us to distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions for green patents to occur. A necessary condition is one that must be present for the outcome to occur, while a sufficient condition is one that alone is enough to produce the outcome. By identifying necessary microfoundations, we can focus our efforts on addressing the most critical factors that enable green patents to occur. Moreover, understanding the sufficiency of specific microfoundations can help us to identify the key drivers of innovation and develop strategies that capitalize on these drivers.