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Home
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Working Papers
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Does quality pay off? “Superstar” wines and the uncertain price premium across quality grades

Working Paper No. 270

Published: 2021
Category:
Economics

Does quality pay off? “Superstar” wines and the uncertain price premium across quality grades

Stefano Castriota, Stefano Corsi, Paolo Dyno Frumento & Giordano Ruggeri
Full Text PDF
Abstract
We use data from Wine Spectator on 266,301 bottles from 12 countries sold in the United States to investigate the link between the score awarded by the guide and the price charged. In line with the literature, the link between quality and price is positive. In a deeper inspection, however, hedonic regressions show that the price premium attached to higher quality is significant only for “superstar” wines with more than 90 points (in a 50-100 scale), while prices of wines between 50 and 90 points are not statistically different from each other. Furthermore, an analysis performed through normal heteroskedastic and quantile regression models shows that the dispersion of quality-adjusted prices is described by an asymmetric U-shaped function of the score; that is, products with the lowest and highest quality have the highest residual standard deviation. Pursuing excellence is a risky strategy: the average price is significantly higher only for wines that achieve top scores, and the price premium becomes more volatile.

Keywords: Wine, price, quality
JEL codes: L11, Q11, L66

Submission

Please send your papers as PDF files to the editor, Victor Ginsburgh, at vginsbur@ulb.ac.be
Papers will be quickly reviewed, prior to potential posting on the website. Decision will be to post or not, possibly with short comments, but without referee reports. The decision will be based primarily on the suitability of the paper’s topic to the aims of the Association.
Such decisions are independent of publication decisions for the Journal of Wine Economics.

Working Paper publication requires that at least one author
is a regular member of AAWE.

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