On June 19-21, 2015 Agriculture Policy Research Center (APRC) attended a conference organized by the Armenian Economic Association and jointly hosted by Yerevan State University (YSU), the Central Bank of Armenia (CBA-Dilijan), and the American University of Armenia (AUA). The conference, structured in several parallel sessions, lasted for three days and united young researchers, Ph.D. students and professors from the US, Canada and Europe.

During the conference APRC’s Senior Research Associate Salome Gelashvili gave a presentation titled “The role of family farming in the sustainable development of agriculture and poverty reduction in Georgia”. Ms. Gelashvili talked about the economic, social and environmental benefits of family farms as well as about the challenges these family farms have to face. She also discussed the place of family farms in the agricultural value chains and strategies for the development of family farms. She concluded the presentation with key policy recommendations.

Dr. Florian Biermann, professor at ISET, has also presented his paper “Friendship Markets” co-authored with Nikoloz Pkhakadze and Saba Devdariani, research fellows at ISET-PI. Dr. Biermann discussed the mechanism of friendship preferences of individuals.

Another presenter from ISET was our student Aram Grigoryan who presented his paper on the topic “The Heuristic of Subsets: A Model of Probabilistic Discrimination”. In his paper he constructed a model of probability assessment based on the heuristic and used experiments to show how people behave. He also discussed the examples of economic decision making where the heuristic would be relevant.

The presentations were followed Q&A sessions and lively discussion with the conference participants.