WORD-OF-MOUTH VERSUS EXPERTS AND REPUTATION IN THE INDIVIDUAL DYNAMICS OF WINE PURCHASING

Tatiana Bouzdine-Chameeva () and Serge Galam ()
Additional contact information
Tatiana Bouzdine-Chameeva: BEM Bordeaux Management School, France
Serge Galam: Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée, École Polytechnique and CNRS, Boulevard Victor, 32, 75015 Paris, France

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2011, vol. 14, issue 06, 871-885

Abstract: The dynamics of wine purchasing behavior is studied focusing on the respective impacts of the word-to-mouth versus wine expert judgements and reputations. To investigate the problem we apply the Galam model of opinion dynamics to agents who have to select a preference about which type of wine to buy given expert judgements, individual preferences and wine reputations. It could be, for instance, a preference between Bordeaux and Burgundy. The main novelty of the work is not about the building of a new model but indeed the construction of a scheme to confront the Galam model to a specific problem of the real world. Accordingly we design a commercial strategy to hold on to a share of the wine market. It provides a novel understanding on how, given some established reputation, the competitive interplay between social interactions and expert judgments affects the market shares distribution. The financial implications of the practical implementation of these results are discussed. In particular it is found that sample distribution of bottles could be drastically reduced from the usual levels practiced by producers. We hope our results will convince some wine producers to test our predictions.

Keywords: Wine purchasing; experts' impact; modeling; threshold dynamics; opinion dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219525911003475
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:acsxxx:v:14:y:2011:i:06:n:s0219525911003475

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0219525911003475

Access Statistics for this article

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS) is currently edited by Frank Schweitzer

More articles in Advances in Complex Systems (ACS) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().