Explaining price variability in tha Italian market for high quality wines

In the last 20 years the Italian wine market exhibited a dramatic change. While total consumption has been falling there has been a continuos rise in the demand for high quality product. The paper analyses the price-quality relationships in the market for the Italian high quality wines, in order to better understand current strategies of product differentiation in the wine market. We estimated a regression model with price as dependent variable and a set of quality attributes and reputation indicators as independent variables. The empirical findings show that the higher prices are associated both with higher quality and reputation and that consumer perception of quality is affected by subjective rather than objective quality attributes.