speaking at my first economics conference

Right off the bat: Economics is Matty and Val's area of expertise. I am a grain quality specialist who dabbles in linking rice quality with economics. So when I was tasked to attend the Food and Fertiliser Technology Centre and Kasetsart University's International Conference, I felt like I was fish out of water... this wasn't my field of expertise but I was going to speak about experimental auctions (a method in Economics that reveals willingness-to-pay of target consumers for goods). 

In the weeks leading up to this conference, I wrote an abstract, crunched the raw data for preliminary results, wrote a full paper, and created a slide deck about the experimental auctions I did with Matty and Anna at Robinsons Pioneer. We wanted to figure out the willingness-to-pay for cultural preservation through the consumption of heirloom rice within the gastronomic system of the target consumers for heirloom rice. Matty also took time in teaching me the differences between Vickrey second-price and the Becker-deGroot-Marschak auctions, how to respond to issues on deception (which we were very carefully avoided in our experiment), and why we conducted endow-and-upgrade instead of normal auctions. A crash course in consumer economics, if I can say so myself. Val, on the other hand, was very confident that I'd perform well, knowing how much prep I did.

Finally, I was in Bangkok to present our work. The conference was entitled "International Seminar on Promoting Rice Farmers' Market through Value-Adding Activities". Orachos, an economist I met during the FAO conference last November, spearheaded the organisation of this FFTC-KU conference. 

The speakers came from different countries in Asia. IRRI fielded three speakers: me, Reianne (IRRI-HQ, on Learning Alliances in Myanmar) and Aldas (IRRI-India, on value-addition perspectives in India).

As Val predicted, my talk went quite well. I was able to share the story of how cultural heritage is closely linked with heirloom rice in the Cordilleras; such that the Philippine government views commodification of heirloom rice as a means of preserving Cordilleran rice farming culture and practices (including the world-famous rice terraces). Preliminary results indicate, among others, that heirloom rice consumption may benefit from positive framing of the cultural preservation story.

I was asked about econometrics, a field I have very limited knowledge of at the moment. I did write a paper with Val and Matty on hedonic pricing models but I left the maths to Val and his team while I concentrated on the grain quality aspect of that paper. Anyway, I hope that Anna starts working in earnest on the econometrics real soon so we can publish our results in a peer-reviewed journal.

Professor Lin, the director of the FFTC, had the most technical questions from the audience (and all of the questions were about the Economics bit of the study). Luckily, I didn't have to dig very deep into Matty's lessons because we didn't go into the details of the different auction types (whew!).

The photo below was taken before our presentations so we all had nervous grins (except Ronald, the coordinator from FFTC). All our talks went well so we're all grinning more at the end of the day.

Note to self: the Banana Republic tie-shift dress and the Nine West slingback pumps will now be in the regular conference attire rotation. They're now in the lucky ensemble category. They won't serve just as travel clothes anymore.