The role of customer and expert ratings in a hedonic analysis of French red wine prices: from gurus to geeks?

Stephen Bazen (1, 2) , Jean-Marie Cardebat (3, 4) , Magalie Dubois (3, 5)

1 AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques
2 AMU - Aix Marseille Université
3 BSE - Bordeaux Sciences Economiques
4 INSEEC - Institut des hautes études économiques et commerciales | School of Business and Economics
5 CEREN - Centre de Recherche sur l'ENtreprise [Dijon]

Wine experts’ ratings provide quality information and reduce the information asymmetry for the consumer. We hypothesize that consumers’ ratings will come to dominate expert ratings in the wine expertise market. We employ a hedonic regression framework on the attributes of 36,970 French red wines to determine the relative impacts of expert and Vivino community ratings on wine prices. Average consumer ratings are found to have a larger effect on price than expert scores. These results are found to be robust to outliers and the general conclusion that peers matter more than experts holds when we exclude the top-end wines.

Mots clés: Hedonic analysis; Wine experts; Peer rating; wine prices; Quality evaluation

Domaines: Economies et finances

Stephen Bazen, Jean-Marie Cardebat, Magalie Dubois. The role of customer and expert ratings in a hedonic analysis of French red wine prices: from gurus to geeks?. Applied Economics, 2023, pp.1-17. ⟨10.1080/00036846.2023.2257036⟩. ⟨hal-04213314⟩