Reputation tapping

rickard, j. bradley; mccluskey, j. jill; patterson, w. richard;

Models describing the development of collective reputation have focused on the impact of past performance measures, but ignore the role of various marketing efforts for food and beverage products that highlight appellation information.Wedesigned a laboratory experiment and used auction data to estimate consumer response to information tying US wine regions to famous wine production regions in France, a phenomenon we define as reputation tapping. Results show that reputation tapping increases bids for the wines produced in burgeoning US wine regions. Our findings also suggest that full protection of geographical indications may require monitoring of activities beyond those by individual firms.