Do You Really Get What You Pay For? Maybe not....

California Institute of Technology economist Antonio Rangel recent research shows customers experienced more pleasere when they thought they were drinking more expensive wines in contrast to well known tendicies for people to believe a wine tastes better if it costs more.

Subjects were given what they thought were five different wines in a blind taste test, but actually two wines were duplicates. The first wine they were told cost $90 and the duplicate cost just $10. They actually enjoyed the more expensive wine more as measured by an MRI measuring the activity level in the medial orbitofrontal cortex.

Are the consumers the last to find out about this? Have the vineyards known this all along and used this knowledge to sell more wine by packaging the same wine in different bottles with different labels and raising the price, knowing that we will enjoy it more because it cost more?

Your thoughts?