The old saying “you are what you eat” correlates the quality of your diet to your level of health and energy. For Michelle Segovia, that saying breeds some important questions: “What do people eat?” “Why do people eat the way they do?” And, “How can we best change dietary habits?” 

“I’ve been paying attention to how people choose their food products ever since I was a teenager,” said Segovia, the University of Delaware Genuardi Assistant Professor of Food and Agribusiness Marketing and Management. “When I would go to the grocery store, I was always interested in food packaging, all the information we get exposed to as a consumer, and the choice overload we encounter at the supermarket.”

Segovia, who joined the UD Department of Applied Economics and Statistics last August, is an experimental economist who researches consumer behavior and the economics of food choice. She conducts economic experiments to investigate the mechanisms underlying food choice and how these relate to health and nutrition outcomes. 

Her research relies on primary data collection from both lab and field economic experiments, which test the effectiveness of behavioral interventions in promoting healthy eating habits and how consumers respond to economic incentives. She has run economic experiments in restaurants and state fairs, examining how modifications in menus might influence food purchases and portion size selection. In a paper published in “Food Policy” in 2022, Segovia and co-authors demonstrated how a restaurant’s menu giving consumers the option to select smaller portion sizes accompanied by a donation to a hunger relief charity influenced consumers to be generous and opt for the smaller portion.

Recently, she expanded her research to examine producer behavior, in particular the behavioral, economic and technological factors influencing producers’ adoption of artificial intelligence technologies, a hot topic in agriculture. On the one hand, AI can help farmers see how well their crops are growing, lower the risk of pesticides being overapplied to crops, and even decrease the need for manual labor in the field. On the other hand, this technology is expensive and unfamiliar to most farmers. The technology generates a lot of data, sparking some worries that AI could put their sensitive information at risk. 

So, how willing are farmers to adopt new AI-based technologies and use them in their everyday work? That’s what Segovia hopes to answer.

“The adoption rate and acceptance of these technologies by farmers is very low,” Segovia said. “Farmers and stakeholders may mistrust technology providers due to the black box nature of these tools, a perceived lack of robustness, unfamiliarity with contacts such as a salesperson, and issues regarding data ownership.” 

As a behavioral and experimental economist, Segovia aims to understand who the decision makers are, what they know and perceive about the innovation, and who they trust and relate to, with the goal of developing an innovation that is relevant and trusted by a diversity of stakeholders (commodity farmers, organic farmers, intermediaries, consumers). 

Segovia’s research on AI in agriculture is funded by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture. She has studied what the adoption of new agricultural technologies looks like for commodity crop farmers in agriculture-heavy states Iowa and Missouri. She has been working to expand this research to Delaware, which has strong roots in agriculture and more than 2,300 family farms.