Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T03:06:02.395Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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: [email protected].
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: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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.

References

Abroad, Canada (2019). Tie breaking rule for express entry. Available at https://www.canadaabroad.com/tie-breaking-rule-express-entry/ (accessed April 28, 2019).Google Scholar
Alvo, M., and Yu, P. L. H. (2014). Statistical Methods for Ranking Data. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ashlagi, I., and Nihzad, A. (2017). What matters in tie breaking rules? How competition guides design. Available at https://web.stanford.edu/~iashlagi/papers/Ties-Competition.pdf (accessed May 26, 2019).Google Scholar
Assets, Liquid (2019). How to buy them, store them, drink them or sell them. Liquid Assets, October. Available at http://www.liquidasset.com/ (accessed October 1, 2019).Google Scholar
Bodington, J. C. (2017a). The distribution of ratings assigned to blind replicates. Journal of Wine Economics, 12(4), 363–369.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bodington, J. C. (2017b). Disentangling wine judges’ consensus, idiosyncratic, and random ratings of quality or preference. Journal of Wine Economics, 12(3), 267–281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bodington, J. C., and Malfeito-Ferreira, M. (2018). Do female and male judges assign the same ratings to the same wines? Journal of Wine Economics, 13(4), 403–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cellars, College (2019). Alumni, College Cellars of Walla Walla rock San Francisco chronicle wine competition. College Cellars of Walla Walla, January 29. Available at http://collegecellars.com/alumni-college-cellars-of-walla-walla-rock-san-francisco-chronicle-wine-competition/ (accessed April 23, 2019).Google Scholar
Fridjhon, M. (2019). Wine score devaluation and its implications. winemag.co.za, May 29. Available at https://winemag.co.za/michael-fridjhon-wine-score-devaluation-and-its-implications/ (accessed July 28, 2019).Google Scholar
Ginsburgh, V., and Zang, I. (2012). Shapley ranking of wines. Journal of Wine Economics, 7(2), 169–180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goode, J. (2017). Score inflation is everywhere and it's killing wine criticism. Jamie Goode's Wine Blog, October 4. Available at http://www.wineanorak.com/wineblog/uncategorized/score-inflation-is-everywhere-and-its-killing-wine-criticism (accessed April 23, 2019).Google Scholar
Hulkower, N. D. (2012). Comment on “A new method to obtain a consensus ranking of a region's vintages’ quality”. Journal of Wine Economics, 7(2), 241–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Indy International Wine Competition (2019). Judging guidelines. Available at http://www.indyinternational.org/judges/guidelines/ (accessed April 23, 2019).Google Scholar
Kallen, C. (2013). Cloverdale's wine tasting competition picks SF chronicle's winners. patch.com, January 12. Available at https://patch.com/california/healdsburg/cloverdale-s-wine-tasting-competition-chooses-sf-chro53e426f712 (accessed April 23, 2019).Google Scholar
Laube, J. (2013). Wine Rating Inflation. Wine Spectator, May 15.Google Scholar
Mallows, C. L. (1957). Non-null ranking models. Biometrika, 44, 114–130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marden, J. I. (1995). Analyzing and Modeling Rank Data. London: Chapman & Hall.Google Scholar
Quandt, R. E. (2012). Comments on the judgement of Princeton. Journal of Wine Economics, 7(2), 152–154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, T. C., and Smith, W. D. (2007). Range voting with small electorates; comparison of several tie-breaking methods. RangeVoting.org, March 3. Available at https://rangevoting.org/TieBreakIdeas.html (accessed May 1, 2019).Google Scholar