From Gurus to Geeks? The Role of Customer and Expert Ratings in a Hedonic Analysis of French Red Wine Prices

Wine is an experience good whose true quality can only be known by consuming it. This characteristic provides a rationale for recourse to experts who provide information on wine quality and reduce the information asymmetry for the consumer. Consumers may come to rely more on the comments and ratings of other consumers or peers, rather than those of experts (guides, specialized journals, personalities). This tendency has been observed in the hospitality (restaurants, hotels) and cultural (movies, novels) markets where popular applications exist and allow information to be collected from peers. We hypothesize that consumers’ ratings will come to dominate expert ratings in the wine expertise market. We use the ratings posted by consumers on the Vivino online marketplace for 37,960 French red wines. We employ a hedonic regression framework which includes the usual attributes of the wines as well as the ratings from both recognized experts and those of consumers on the Vivino platform. 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.