According to a 2014 report by U.S. News & World Report, worldwide beer consumption tops that of wine by a wide margin, with the former amounting to 187 billion liters per year while the latter totals only 24 billion liters annually (Soergel 2014).Footnote 1 China tops the world’s annual beer consumption ranking at 44.2 million kiloliters consumed, followed by the USA (24.2 million kiloliters), Brazil (12.8 million kiloliters), Russia (10.6 million kiloliters), and Germany (8.6 million kiloliters). In terms of per capita consumption, nine of the top 10 beer-consuming countries reside in Europe, led by the Czech Republic, whose typical citizen consumes 418 bottles (12 oz) per year.Footnote 2 Despite the worldwide popularity of beer, scholarly study of beer lags far behind that of wine, as represented by the lengthy list of hedonic pricing studies of various aspects of wine that have appeared in the economics literature over the past two decades (e.g., Nerlove 1995, Combris et al. 1997, Landon and Smith 1997, 1998, Anderson and Schamel 2003, Fogarty 2006, Lima 2006, Costanigro et al. 2007, and Costanigro et al. 2009).Footnote 3
Given the importance of beer style variety to consumers of beer, an understanding of the impact on demand of the various characteristics of beer is essential to breweries and retailers. To date, however, the economics literature includes relatively little research using hedonic methods to evaluate beer pricing.Footnote 4 For example, in an unpublished study, Schamel (2009) uses a hedonic model to explain variations in beer prices (per pint) across major cities around the world using attributes and demographics of the city.Footnote 5 More recently, Empen and Hamilton (2015) estimate the effect of games played during the German Bundesliga (soccer) season on the price of beer. Neither of these studies, however, shines any substantial light on the importance of various beer characteristics on the prices of domestic and foreign beers.
Going beyond the basic relationship between beer characteristics and beer prices, as firm success in the market for beer relies on repeat purchase behavior, consumer ratings of beer can, given the sequential nature of its consumption, play a useful role in combating the issue of asymmetric information, thus substantially increasing the economic welfare of beer consumers. We are not aware of a study that examines the impact of consumer ratings on beer prices. This study addresses the aforementioned void in the economics literature by employing beer-level data in order to estimate a hedonic price regression model for beer. We investigate the impact of both beer characteristics and consumer ratings on beer prices. Using information from over 400 different beers, we find that, ceteris paribus, higher consumer ratings are associated with higher prices, such that a 10-point increase in an average consumer rating is associated with about a 50-cents increase in the price of a unit (i.e., a six-pack) of beer.
The consumption of beer, much like that of diamonds (see Lee et al. 2014), involves sensory characteristics, such as taste (flavor), weight, and aroma. As such, consumer evaluation of a good such as beer is tied to the economics of information, which has, beginning with the pioneering work of Stigler (1961), Nelson (1970), and Spence (1973), become an important facet of modern microeconomic theory over the past half century. Since these seminal studies, research has shown that, in addition to determining the number and type of informational cues appearing in seller-provided advertisements, the types and characteristics of goods play an important role in pricing. Following Nelson (1970, 1974), search goods are those for which consumers are able to make pre-purchase judgments regarding product attributes/quality at relatively low cost, while experience goods are those for which such judgments can be made by consumers only post-purchase.Footnote 6
The seminal studies comprising the economics of information connect to a more recent study by Che (1996), including an extension by Mixon (1999), that explores consumer learning implications through a mathematical model wherein consumers realize idiosyncratic valuations of the good, such as “buyer’s remorse,” only after purchase. Following Che (1996), we assume a risk-neutral, profit-maximizing monopoly seller facing a unit mass of customers (consumers) that incurs retail costs of c ∈ [0, v *] for each unit of the good (beer), including payments to a distributor. The consumers’ preferences for the good (beer) are unknown pre-purchase but are learned post-purchase. A consumer’s preference is parameterized by a “valuation,” v, that is drawn randomly from \( \left[\underline{v},v*\right],0\ \le \underline{v}<v* \), by a distribution function, F(·), which has a well-defined positive density function, f(·) (Che 1996, p. 18). Che (1996, p. 18) notes also that consumers are ex ante identical and that their ex post realized valuations are purely idiosyncratic. Che (1996, pp. 18–19) also considers a simple return policy with a cash refund for any return, which consumers can implement at zero cost.
The von Neumann utility function described in Che (1996, p. 19), which represents a consumer purchasing a good at price p and realizing v, is U(v–p), where U(·) is strictly increasing, is (weakly) concave, and exhibits constant absolute risk aversion. The utility from “no purchase” is normalized to be 0, such that U(0) = 0 (Che 1996, p. 19). Employing a von Neumann utility function and a “no return” policy, the seller’s profit is inversely related to the degree of consumer aversion. The consumer will purchase the good (beer) if (and only if) E[U(v–p)] ≥ 0, where U and p represent utility and price, respectively. Given this, the seller sets a price that covers costs or else chooses not to sell the good (Che 1996, pp. 18–19). Therefore, the optimal price, p
n, satisfies E[U(v–p
n)] = 0. Here, (beer) consumers bear the entire risk associated with their ex post valuation, and as risk aversion increases, the seller must lower the price to compensate (beer) consumers for the risk (Che 1996, p. 19).
Given the descriptions accompanying the goods/services included within the search-experience goods typology, sellers and buyers have, respectively, devised profit-maximizing and acquisition cost-minimizing strategies for overcoming the relatively high pre-purchase costs associated with the evaluation of experience goods such as those described in Che (1996), Mixon (1999), and the current study. Regarding the set of strategies implemented in the experience goods case, studies have shown that seller-provided informational cues in print advertisements relate indirectly to the attributes of the good by conveying information on various quality-related characteristics of the seller, such as years of service (experience) and licensures/certifications (Mixon 1995).
Additionally, consumer ratings can play a useful role in combating the issue of asymmetric information discussed in the seminal work of Akerlof (1970) by alerting potential consumers of an experience good to its high-quality (low-quality) attributes.Footnote 7 In this regard, the sequential consumption facilitated by the use of consumer reviews has proven to be helpful in lowering the relatively high pre-purchase evaluation costs typically associated with experience goods. In the following section of this study, the impact of consumer reviews on the pricing of beer is examined by testing a hedonic pricing model using a large set of beer-level data.