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Should Ties Be Broken in Commercial Wine Competitions? When Yes, What Method Is Practical and Defensible?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2019

Jeffrey Bodington  and
Manuel Malfeito-Ferreira
Jeffrey Bodington
Affiliation:
Bodington & Company, 50 California St., San Francisco, CA, 94111; e-mail: jcb@bodingtonandcompany.com.
Manuel Malfeito-Ferreira
Affiliation:
Linking Landscape, Environment, Agriculture and Food Research Centre (LEAF), Instituto Superior de Agronomia, University of Lisbon, Tapada da Ajuda, 1349-017Lisboa, Portugal; e-mail: mmalfeito@isa.ulisboa.pt.
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Abstract

Ties in the averages of scores that commercial wine competitions employ to grant awards are common, and these ties make it difficult for competition officials to differentiate between wines, they erode the perception of judges’ expertise, and they can make compliance with competition rules arithmetically impossible. Responding to requests from competition officials, this article presents and evaluates six methods for breaking ties in averages of scores. Results show that using an Olympic Average, the mean excluding the highest and lowest scores, is easy to calculate, easy to communicate, effective, unbiased, and it is not inconsistent with the implications of a method of aggregating scores that is not prone to ties. (JEL Classifications: A10, C00, C10, C12, D12)

Keywords

breakcompetitionscoresstatisticstieswine
Type
Shorter Papers and Comments
Information
Journal of Wine Economics , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 298 - 308
Copyright
Copyright © American Association of Wine Economists 2019

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Footnotes

The authors thank Henrique Soares, President of Península de Setúbal Appellation for providing the results of the 2019 Setúbal Challenge. The authors also thank an anonymous reviewer for insightful and constructive comments.

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