Skip to content
Have an account?
Login
or
Register
  • About
    • People
    • Fellows
    • Tastings
    • In the News
    • Awards
      • Christophe Baron Prize
      • AAWE Scholarships
      • AAWE Awards of Merits
    • Downloads
    • Contacts & Copyright
  • Journal
    • Online Journal Member Access
    • Online Journal Library Access
    • Editors
    • JWE – All Issues
    • Submission Guidelines
  • Working Papers
  • Meetings
    • 2024 Lausanne
    • 2023 Stellenbosch
    • 2022 Tbilisi
    • 2019 Vienna
    • 2018 Ithaca
    • 2017 Padua
    • 2016 Bordeaux
    • 2015 Mendoza
    • 2014 Walla Walla
    • 2013 Stellenbosch
    • 2012 Princeton
    • 2011 Bolzano
    • 2010 Davis
    • 2009 Reims
    • 2008 Portland
    • 2007 Trier
  • Membership
Menu
  • About
    • People
    • Fellows
    • Tastings
    • In the News
    • Awards
      • Christophe Baron Prize
      • AAWE Scholarships
      • AAWE Awards of Merits
    • Downloads
    • Contacts & Copyright
  • Journal
    • Online Journal Member Access
    • Online Journal Library Access
    • Editors
    • JWE – All Issues
    • Submission Guidelines
  • Working Papers
  • Meetings
    • 2024 Lausanne
    • 2023 Stellenbosch
    • 2022 Tbilisi
    • 2019 Vienna
    • 2018 Ithaca
    • 2017 Padua
    • 2016 Bordeaux
    • 2015 Mendoza
    • 2014 Walla Walla
    • 2013 Stellenbosch
    • 2012 Princeton
    • 2011 Bolzano
    • 2010 Davis
    • 2009 Reims
    • 2008 Portland
    • 2007 Trier
  • Membership
DONATE
  • Data
  • Jobs & Programs
  • Data
  • Jobs & Programs
Home
»
Working Papers
»
If This Wine Got 96 Out of 100 Points, What Is Wrong with Me? A Critique of Wine Ratings as Psychophysical Scaling

Working Paper No. 239

Published: 2019
Category:
Economics

If This Wine Got 96 Out of 100 Points, What Is Wrong with Me? A Critique of Wine Ratings as Psychophysical Scaling

Denton Marks
Full Text PDF
Abstract
The consumer’s problem in forming a willingness to pay (WTP) for wine, especially fine wine, is one of the thorniest in wine market analysis. The problem raises good questions from the philosophical—What does it mean to know something? How can we know a wine and communicate such knowledge?—to the practical—Is the wine market smaller because of this problem? If so, how much? Much of the problem involves the value and validity of wine ratings.
Because of the consumer’s problem, the content of wine economics—relative to viticulture or oenology or other fields that study wine—has given particular prominence to the role of experts and their ratings. Ashenfelter has characterized the role of experts as one of the two central questions in wine economics (2016), and one can imagine that it is at least as important in wine economics as in other areas of cultural economics (e.g., Ginsburgh 2016). Among the most popular themes in wine economics has been the determination of fine wine prices. Among the most prominent questions in that literature is the impact of expert ratings, although the evidence of a relationship is mixed and limited to a narrow, though financially important, segment of the wine market—results from commercial auctions of classified Bordeaux (e.g., Oczkowski and Doucouliagos, 2014; Luxen, 2018) which provide rare published data on “market-clearing” transactions. Despite that limitation, the attention ratings have received even in that context is good reason to scrutinize what is behind them.

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.

Subscribe to our Email List

You can cancel your subscription at any time.
SUBSCRIBE HERE

Contact

AAWE
Economics Department
New York University
19 W. 4th Street, 6FL
New York, NY 10012, U.S.A.
Tel: (212) 992-8083
Fax: (212) 995-4186
E-Mail: karl.storchmann@nyu.edu

AAWE

Journal

Working Papers as a List

Membership

Videos

LINKS

Fifthsense

JWE at Cambridge University Press

Liquid Assets

Stuart Pigott

Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Policy

Cookies Policy

Twitter Facebook-f Youtube

© AAWE 2021 - All rights reserved