Dr. David Palma A. - Modelling wine choices in a realistic way: combining incentive compatibility, sensory science and discrete-continuous modelling.

Modelling wine choices in a realistic way: combining incentive compatibility, sensory science and discrete-continuous modelling.

Thursday 23 March 2017

Abstract:

Purchasing any food or beverage product is a multi-stage, multi-attribute process. During the first purchase, consumers rely only on extrinsic (i.e. visual) attributes. After purchase consumers can taste the product, perceiving its intrinsic (i.e. sensory) attributes. When re-purchasing the product, consumers have full information about it. Most attempts to model consumers’ choices of food and beverages either focus on only one stage of the process, one kind of attributes, or are limited in terms of their complexity or forecasting possibilities.

We present a novel experimental and modelling framework to study the choice of food and beverages in three stages: (i) purchase, (ii) tasting, and (iii) re-purchase on a controlled yet incentive-compatible setting. Our framework links all stages in a tractable and statistically correct way; it avoids endogeneity issues due to price’s double effect as a cue for quality and as a strain to the budget constrain; it considers the possibility of buying more than one product at a time; and is flexible enough to accommodate several methods of data analysis.