Are geographical indications a worthy quality label? A framework with endogenous quality choice

We analyse the effects of geographical indication labelling on quality choices and welfare in a vertical differentiation framework with two attributes of goods, gustatory quality and geographical origin. We investigate two extreme cases of the protected designation of origin (PDO) label: a denomination standard, which guarantees only the origin of the product without any requirement on production specifications, and a minimum quality requirement, which guarantees both the origin and the quality of the product. We find that as long the PDO good is the high-quality good, binding production specifications on the quality level adversely affect the PDO producer(s).