Market researcher asked affluent Americans to rate 23 mutual-fund companies. High-net-worth consumers say Dodge & Cox offers the "most prestigious" mutual-fund family available, according to an online survey by the Luxury Institute, a New York-based market-research firm.

"Most investors became wealthy through achievement and smart financial management," says the Luxury Institute's CEO Milton Pedraza. "It is amazing how well informed they are about scandal, conflict of interest and lack of transparency, and they rate brands accordingly."

Prestige v. experience

Of the 23 mutual fund families rated in the survey, Dodge & Cox proved particularly popular with "high-earners" ($300,000 a year or more) and with those worth of at least $5 million.

One respondent described Dodge & Cox as "Fabulous," and said the San Francisco-based asset manager provides an "excellent investment strategy and wonderful returns over good and bad years," according to the Luxury Institute.

In alphabetical order, the other firms rated in the Luxury Institute survey were AIM, AllianceBernstein, American Century, American Funds, Barclays, Blackrock, Columbia, Dreyfus, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Janus, JPMorgan, Lord Abbett, MFS, Oppenheimer, PIMCO, Putnam, Scudder, State Street, T. Rowe Price, Van Kampen and Vanguard.

The Luxury Institute conducts two kinds of surveys.

One, like this one about mutual funds, looks at the bare prestige of brand names among affluent consumers. Here Luxury Institute provide survey respondents with a list of brand names. The respondents are asked to rank the ones they recognize in terms of their impression of its prestige. The respondent's personal experience with the brands in question may not be a factor, nor is there an opportunity for a respondent to nominate firms that aren't on the list.

But in a Luxury Institute consumer experience survey, respondents are asked only about firms they've done business with in the previous 12 months. And only firms with a statistically significant number of present (or recently past) users among the respondent pool makes the list.

For its survey on mutual-fund families, the Luxury Institute got about 1,500 responses from affluent Americans. Respondents' average income was $329,000 a year and their average net worth was $3.4 million. The results were weighted to match demographic and net-worth profiles of the same audience according to the Federal Reserve's latest Survey of Consumer Finances. -FWR

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