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Half-Blind Tasting: A Deception-Free Method for Sizing Placebo and Nocebo Responses to Price and Packaging Attributes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2019

Robin S. Goldstein
Robin S. Goldstein*
Affiliation:
University of California Agricultural Issues Center, 1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA95616-8514, USA Université de Bordeaux, Laboratoire d'Analyse et de Recherche en Économie et Finance Internationales, Pessac, France; e-mail: robin.s.goldstein@gmail.com.
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Abstract

Information conveyed on the price tag or label of a consumable packaged good is widely thought to change the consumer's sensory experience of consuming the good. Can the positive “placebo” effects of high prices and negative “nocebo” effects of low prices on consumer experience be isolated and observed in a controlled experiment without using deception? In a pilot wine experiment using a method I call “half-blind tasting,” I observe that the nocebo response to a $5 price tag is stronger than the placebo response to a $50 price tag. To interpret these preliminary results, I borrow some insights from prospect theory. (JEL Classifications: C91, D81, L66, M31, Q11)

Keywords

blind tastingnoceboplaceboprospect theorywine prices
Type
Shorter Papers and Comments
Information
Journal of Wine Economics , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 321 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © American Association of Wine Economists 2019

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Footnotes

I thank an anonymous referee and Karl Storchmann for their helpful comments. I also thank David Card for hosting me as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, where I conducted this experiment with his enthusiastic assistance; Matthew Rabin at Berkeley for his comments on my half-blind methodology; and Hilke Plassmann, Johan Almenberg, Anna Dreber, Shane Frederick, Laurie Santos, Uri Gneezy, and Alexis Herschkowitsch for conversations that led to the development of the ideas and methods presented here.

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