The Impact of Individual and Collective Reputation on Wine Prices: Empirical Evidence from the Mosel Valley

Although of considerable practical importance, the separate impact of individual and collective reputation on firm performance (e.g. product prices) has not yet been convincingly demonstrated. We use a sample of some 70 different wineries offering more than 1,300 different Riesling wines from the Mosel valley to isolate the returns to individual reputation (measured by expert ratings in a highly respected wine guide) from the returns to collective reputation (measured by membership in two different professional associations where members are assumed to monitor each other very closely). We find that both effects are statistically significant and economically relevant with the latter being more important in quantitative terms than the former.