Consumers like a bottle of wine more if they are told it cost ninety dollars a bottle than if they are told it cost ten. Belief that the wine is more expensive turns on the neurons in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with pleasure feelings. Wine without a price tag doesn’t have this effect. In 2008, American food and wine critics teamed up with a statistician from Yale and a couple of Swedish economists to study the results of thousands of blind tastings of wines ranging from $1.65 to $150 a bottle. They found that when they can’t see the price tag, people prefer cheaper wine to pricier bottles. Experts’ tastes did move in the proper direction: they favored finer, more expensive wines. But the bias was almost imperceptible. A wine that cost ten times more than another was ranked by experts only seven points higher on a scale of one to one hundred.
* medial orbitofrontal cortex: 내측 안와(眼窩) 전두 피질