The Italian Grappa Market: An Analysis of Consumer Preferences Through Hedonic Price Analysis

This work carries out a hedonic price analysis in the Italian grappa market. We use a dataset composed of around 15.576 observations of retail chain prices (related to transactions taken place in Italy in the period 1997-2004) and product characteristics. We estimate the implicit price of the main product attributes. Results show that particularly bottle format, high alcohol content and brand affect the consumer’s willingness-to-pay for grappa. In particular, the Prime Uve variable presents statistically significant, positive estimated coefficients, with high magnitude, which we interpreted as a “fads and fashion effect”. In addition, we are able to capture consumer taste evolution over time and consumer taste differences in space (different consumer preferences across Italian regions)