Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the measures taken by legitimate wine investment companies and enforcement agencies to counter alternative investment scams.

The authors interviewed wine industry and law enforcement specialists to understand the nature of wine investment fraud and the characteristics of the victims. They also drew on secondary data in the form of government agency research and media sources.

The majority of wine investment frauds are boiler room operations, using social engineering techniques to draw victims into the fraud. The authors conclude that countering wine investment fraud requires public education by government, the wine industry and the police.

This is a small-scale study that uses interviews with experts in the industry and in law enforcement and secondary data as evidence. Despite the limitations in the number of interviews, the authors are able to comment on the social impacts of alternative investment scams and suggest a theoretical basis for future work in the field.

The authors make a case for regulators and investors to be part of collective action through education and public awareness campaigns to combat alternative investment fraud.

The authors outline how collective action theory might be extended to investigate fraud prevention measures in other financial and commodity markets.

The purpose of this paper is to examine fine wine’s safe-haven status with respect to US equity movements.

We use a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model and its variant to measure the asymmetric reaction to positive and negative shocks.

Our empirical results show an inverted asymmetric volatility in the wine market; positive shocks increase the conditional volatility more than negative shocks. That is the opposite reaction in the volatility of equity returns occurs in the wine market. As leverage effect and volatility feedback effect do not adequately explain this reaction, we follow the work of Baur (2012) and propose the safe haven effect. Several robustness tests largely confirm the empirical findings, with major implications for wine investors. Finally, we provide further evidence on the benefits of adding wine investments to an equity portfolio through an increase in risk reduction effectiveness.

Based on the results of the robustness analysis, the recommendations in terms of including fine wines in portfolios must be issued with caution.

Our findings are crucial to the needs of market participants who are interested in including wine assets in their equity portfolio.

No previous study investigates the safe haven property of fine wine return, and accounts for risk reduction effectiveness when adding wine assets to a portfolio of US equities.

Diversified trading networks have recently drawn a great deal of attention. In the process, the importance of diversity has perhaps been overemphasized. Using the trade in port wine from Portugal to Britain as an example, this essay attempts to show how a market once dominated by general, diversified traders was taken over by dedicated specialists whose success might almost be measured by the degree to which they rejected diversification to form a dedicated “commodity chain.” The essay suggests that this strategy was better able to handle matters of quality and the specialized knowledge that port wine required. The essay also highlights the question of power in such a chain. Endemic commodity-chain struggles are clearest in the vertical brand war that broke out in the nineteenth century, which, by concentrating power, marked the final stage in the transformation of the trade from network to vertical integration.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the macroeconomic determinants of fine-wine prices and estimate their impacts.

The author models the Liv-ex fine-wine price indices with the macroeconomic variables of emerging and developed markets on a monthly basis from 1996 to 2015.

The demand from emerging markets plays a key role in fine-wine pricing and, more precisely, in the price fluctuation of prestige Bordeaux wines. Furthermore, the continuous weakening of the US dollar in real terms favors an increase in fine-wine prices. Since 2011, the slowdown in economic growth in emerging markets, followed by the depreciation of national currencies, has negatively affected the luxury wine market. Along with the process of financialization in the fine-wine market, prices have become more volatile. Factors such as money supply, real interest rates and the growth of investment funds have started to show their influence on fine-wine pricing.

Complementary to the hedonic price modeling, this research can provide an analysis to wine-price modeling and forecasting within the macroeconomic approach.

Many firms, wine producers among them, have successfully communicated the quality of their products to the market by emphasizing the geographic origin, or location of production of critical ingredient(s) found in the product. The purpose of this article is to: introduce the concept of a “place‐based” marketing strategy, i.e. a marketing strategy that identifies a consumer product with a specific geographic area; explain why it is essential to the wine business; and, why it may be superior to other types of marketing strategies for certain types of agricultural products. Additionally, traditional valuation techniques applied to agricultural land typically assume that agricultural goods are undifferentiable commodities. With the growing trend toward the production of “place‐based” agricultural products, the traditional valuation methods omit an important variable – the potential for the geographical source to help develop a product‘s brand equity. This paper also discusses land valuation techniques and applies the concept of products of place to the trend among Californian wine growers to produce wines with vineyard designations.

This paper aims to review, systematize and integrate existing research on alternative investments. This study conducts performance analysis comprising production timeline, country-wise contributions, analysis of sources, affiliations, the geography of authors and citations of studies on alternative investments.

This study adopts a thematic and bibliometric analysis methodology on 570 papers identified from mainstream literature on alternative investments. This study provides an analysis of science mapping, including co-citation analysis, bibliometric coupling, word analysis and trending topics on alternative investments. In addition, the study presents thematic analysis by classifying existing studies into nine themes.

Alternative investments provide diversification benefits and play a critical role in portfolio construction, and the research on alternative investments has gained momentum in recent times. This study finds that hedge funds, private equity, artwork, collectibles, commodities, fine wine and venture capital have remained prominent themes in the field. Investments in cryptocurrencies are an emerging area in the research on alternative investments.

This study limits itself to the papers published in the area of finance and economics listed on the Scopus database.

This study provides quantitative bibliometric analysis and thematic analysis of the extant literature on alternative investments and identifies the areas that could be developed to advance research on alternative investments.

With the rise in wine consumption, accurate wine price forecasts have significantly impacted restaurant and hotel purchasing decisions and inventory management. This study aims to develop a precise and effective wine price point and interval forecasting model.

The proposed forecast model uses an improved hybrid kernel extreme learning machine with an attention mechanism and a multi-objective swarm intelligent optimization algorithm to produce more accurate price estimates. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt at applying artificial intelligence techniques to improve wine price prediction. Additionally, an effective method for predicting price intervals was constructed by leveraging the characteristics of the error distribution. This approach facilitates quantifying the uncertainty of wine price fluctuations, thus rendering decision-making by relevant practitioners more reliable and controllable.

The empirical findings indicated that the proposed forecast model provides accurate wine price predictions and reliable uncertainty analysis results. Compared with the benchmark models, the proposed model exhibited superiority in both one-step- and multi-step-ahead forecasts. Meanwhile, the model provides new evidence from artificial intelligence to explain wine prices and understand their driving factors.

This study is a pioneering attempt to evaluate the applicability and effectiveness of advanced artificial intelligence techniques in wine price forecasts. The proposed forecast model not only provides useful options for wine price forecasting but also introduces an innovative addition to existing forecasting research methods and literature.

To examines strategies that have locked the Australian wine industry into a price‐sensitive, commodity wine market. The paper seeks to explain the inherent weakness of these strategies and their inability to address current challenges and opportunities.

The paper uses empirical research data gathered from 100 SME wine firms. These firms were selected using a stratified random sampling technique. Four states were covered – New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Western Australia – with all major wine regions in these states equally represented. There was careful sampling according to size, so that boutique, and small‐ and medium‐sized firms were represented. Non‐exporting firms were excluded. In each case either the CEO or the marketing manager was interviewed.

The findings confirm the paper's hypothesis, that increasingly the Australian wine industry has become risk‐averse and locked into paradigms and organizational frameworks that are disconnecting from users and their requirements. The findings concur that greater differentiation of place, product, supply chains, and markets is required if the industry is to operate effectively within a multi‐dimensional landscape and continue to attract sustainable returns.

The paper was based largely upon user perceptions about current and future industry developments. It would be extremely valuable if future research could align these perceptions with performance data at industry and firm level to provide a more convincing map of R&D activity.

This paper has significant implications and policy advice for future industry organization. The most immediate and important of these is a strategy of emphasizing differentiated, regionally‐identified products that target higher price‐points in major markets. The industry has already indicated that it intends moving in this direction.

The original aspect of the paper is its organization ecology approach to the industry, in which national parameters are replaced by a perception of global operating landscapes. In this sense, users are not only participants, but also spectators and interpreters. The paper should be of value to researchers, policy‐makers and all industry stakeholders.

This paper explores questions of value and the just price for two groups of farming families in southern Tuscany. As sharecroppers or small-holders they experienced the slow shift from subsistence farming to creating most of their livelihoods by selling the products or their labour. This created a complicated legacy in their views about the relationship between use-value and monetary value since the interaction of different spheres of the economy (what Gudeman calls mutuality and the market) continued to impact significantly on their material well-being and cultural values. This emerges in many contexts, from decisions to continue producing food for home consumption, to abandoning the investments of previous generations. In each case the quantitative questions (what does it cost? what is it worth?) play out alongside qualitative questions about use-values, values which are embedded in issues about the continuation of social and cultural relations. Two main points then emerge from this ethnography. First that in many circumstances local views about the just price cannot be understood by restricting the account to the market sphere. Even the innovative farming households who have moved to the production of high-quality foodstuffs find themselves in a market which eulogizes non-commercial values. Second, views about the just price mostly arise as part of a critique of the powerful forces shaping markets, and often draw on older political traditions concerned with social justice.

Identifying the barriers that hinder the circularity in the wine industry in Bulgaria and proposing a preliminary circular economy (CE) index for ranking in order of importance the barriers for providing a suitable and replicable model through the contextualization of the study applied at the territorial level.

The article adopts a Fuzzy AHP methodology based on 6 main barriers and 19 sub-barriers to find the weights of the barriers and rank them. The study was conducted in Bulgaria, and it consists of a questionnaire with pairwise comparisons to ask for expert opinions of members of the Executive Board of the National Association of Bulgarian Vinegrowers and additional members of the regional vine and winegrowing chambers.

The study identifies training and education and environmental barriers as the most important among the main barriers whereas, economic barriers are assessed as low impact. Considering the sub-barriers, lack of consumer awareness and interest, unclear taxation for CE, lack of knowledge about environmental emissions (carbon, water etc.) within the supply chains, and lack of digital trends are determined as the most significant sub-barriers.

The preliminary CE index can be practically used and tested, when necessary, by each winemaker according to their understanding and opinion of CE barriers and sub-barriers. The ranking within the CE index can lead winemakers also to decisions related to the company's social policy.

The study uses the Fuzzy AHP methodology with expert opinions to analyze and weigh the main barriers to achieving CE at the micro-level.