In my experience with mechanical watches there is no strong correlation between price & timing accuracy/precision. A good Japanese mass-produced workhorse movement like the Miyota 9015 costs around $100 and can be tuned to have 0.0 - 0.1 ms of beat error and +/- 4 secs / day. It doesn't come from the factory like that but with the tools & timegrapher you can get it there yourself. This equals or beats any of the Swiss ETA movements I've messed with in multi-kilobuck watches. Then there are in-house movements which are all over the map. Some no better than mass produced, others that take accuracy to a whole 'nuther level. But anyone who pays that kind of $$$ isn't really buying accuracy or precision (you could get that a lot cheaper), they're buying history, heritage, uniqueness, hand-crafting, style, etc.
Now, don't go too far. The typical 9015 specifies positional variation across a range of 40 seconds/day, with an accuracy of -10 to +30 seconds per day. You can regulate it to keep good time with your wear pattern, but that does not make it accurate in the sense that it is maintains that timing in each position separately.
Contrast that to a chronometer, which will be adjusted to fall within +6/-4 seconds per day in each of five positions (crown up, crown right, crown left, dial up, dial down) at a range of temperatures. The testing protocol takes 24 hours for each condition, so it's not just putting on a timegrapher and reading the result--it's setting the movement, putting it in the correct position, winding, and coming back tomorrow to see where it landed. And these are tested by a central agency (COSC), not just by the manufacturers.
The beat rate is a different measure--it determines that the balance wheel swings as far after the "tick" (when the pallet fork is swinging one way) as it does after the "tock" (when the pallet fork is swinging the other way). Any movement can be adjusted for zero beat error with enough effort.
All the major movement manufacturers that sell movements to OEMs offer movements in various grades of adjustment. ETA, for example (the biggest of the Swiss makers) has four grades for standard movements and three grades for premiere movements. The bottom grades are minimally finished and unadjusted, and the top grade is highly finished and certified by the chronometer agency. Citizen (who makes Miyota movements) owns some high-end Swiss movement factories, including, for example, La Joux Perret, so they well know the difference in these grades. Even the 9015 is offered in various grades, though it is a price-point movement usually not adjusted to chronometer accuracy. Again, as long as a watch gets used in a similar pattern, it can be regulated to keep good time over a scale of days even if it varies in its timekeeping quite a lot with changes in position.
That said, there are chronometer-certified watches with price-point movements, and high-end hand-finished movements that are not. But Patek-Philippe, for example, expects their movements to be adjusted within +/- 2 seconds/day in all positions and temperatures. Rolex also sets a higher standard internally than the official chronometer standard, even though they consume about 80% of the COSC's workload. Omega also has its own standard that is in the same 2-second/day range. I own several Miyota-powered watches, and they certainly don't come out of the box with positional accuracy or even regulation that good. Swatch claimed that the cheap, plastic-cased Sistem 51 was accurate to within four seconds a day, and in my experience that accuracy lasted about a month before falling off noticeably. It cannot be adjusted, either.
My Seiko Black Monster diver runs within a few seconds a day measured over a typical week. But positional variation on a timegrapher is all over the map, as is expected with a budget movement like the 4R36. Still, it's a great watch for what it is. I paid a couple of hundred bucks for it--a good deal for an ISO 6425-certified professional dive watch (not that any pro diver would use a mechanical watch except as a backup).
As with most things mechanical, getting good performance is a matter of design, excellent performance is a matter of tuning, and superb performance requires blueprinting perfection. For watch movements, the positional accuracy windows for those three levels is something like +/- 30, +/- 15, and +/- 5 seconds per day. That extra adjustment comes either as a result of expert hand adjustment by a master watchmaker, or by laser trimming and robotic alignments. The machines that do that to a high level were the real innovations in mechanical watchmaking in the last couple of decades. But if a robotically adjusted watch gets whacked, a watchmaker is going to have a hard time getting it back to chronometer performance, because the movement is not designed for hand adjustment.
It's a bit like getting good sound from LP records, though. The challenge and the fun of it is attaining the very best that technology can muster up. And for most folks, it's more than good enough, especially if they are rotating through several watches anyway.
Rick "wearing an Ebel at present that is double-COSC certified, and it won't need resetting for a month or two" Denney