 Do geographical appellations provide useful quality signals? The case of Scotch single malt whiskiesBruno Pecchioli and David Moroz Economic Modelling, 2023, vol. 124, issue C Abstract: Collective reputation signals, such as geographical appellations or similar labels, aim to provide information concerning the quality of goods supplied by a group of producers and enable differentiation between groups. Several studies have shown that reputation can be disconnected from quality, raising doubts concerning the informational content of specific collective labels. Our study examines Scotch whisky geographical appellations as an unexplored case with collective label requirements that do not permit vertical differentiation. We use a dataset covering 83,494 sales records over nine years in the Scotch whisky second-hand market and run hedonic price analyses, finding evidence of a collective reputation effect, even after controlling for distillery individual reputation and bottle characteristics. These findings suggest that appellations can benefit from a reputation premium, despite low informational content. As a corollary, an appellation system can be profitable for certain producers without providing any helpful quality signals for consumers. Keywords: Collective reputation; Geographical appellation; Quality signal; Hedonic price analysis; Scotch whisky (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:124:y:2023:i:c:s0264999323001438 DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2023.106331 Access Statistics for this article Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier |
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