J.-François Outreville Receives Best Paper Award in Palermo

The Adjunct Professor examined the price strategies of Quebec wine producers

October 6, 2010

J.-François Outreville, Adjunct Professor with the Department of Finance, won the best paper award for his article entitled “Wine Production in Québec and the Price-Quality Relationship” from the Vineyard Data Quantification Society, at the Enometrics XVII conference of the European Association of Wine Economists.

In the paper, Professor Outreville analyzes the growth over the past 15 years of this very young sector of the Quebec economy. He focuses primarily on one aspect of competition between wine producers: price strategy, which determines market positioning.  In the absence of an established reputation, the perception of a new wine’s quality is inevitably linked in consumers’ minds to price. Accordingly, price is a factor that new producers must take into account in positioning their wines in this highly competitive market.

In the paper, Professor Outreville shows that a high price strategy is inversely related to the number of wines produced by a given producer and the age of the firm. At the same time, he shows that there is a positive relationship with the perceived quality of wines as illustrated by jury grades or medals.

Professor Outreville holds a PhD in Economics from the Université d'Orléans, in France. His paper is of immediate interest for new or small wine-growing regions that do not yet have an established reputation.

He was previously an economist at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), in Geneva. He also has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin, the National University of Singapore, Shanghai University and the University of Nijenrode, in the Netherlands.