Gift-giving is difficult and Julian Givi, an assistant professor of marketing for the John Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University, has proved it.
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There is a considerable gap in our current understanding of gift-giving because much of what has been studied has focused on gift-giving as an affair between just two consumers a single giver and a recipient. Little is known about the impact other gifts have on the recipient of the gifts, even though some of the most common occasions for giving a gift, such as birthdays, the winter holidays, Mothers and Fathers Day, graduations, bridal showers, baby showers, bachelor and bachelorette parties, going away parties, and retirement parties, all typically involve a recipient receiving gifts from several different givers.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon s Tepper School of Business and West Virginia University s John Chambers College of Business and Economics set out to understand gift giving dynamics in these settings and how a giver s and a recipient s evaluation of the giver s gift is influenced by the other gifts the recipient receives.