scholarly journals What should I do? The role of reciprocity and social norms on gift choices

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 26-52
Author(s):  
Daniel Modenesi Andrade ◽  
Lucia Salmonson Guimarães Barros

Objective: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how individuals resolve a conflict between reciprocity and social norms when choosing the price of a gift, and to investigate whether gift exchanges conducted in public or private and people’s appreciation for past gifts play a moderating role in this decision.Method: We ran two web-based survey experiments.Main results: Results showed that when people must choose between reciprocity and social norms, people tend to be reciprocal. However, there are some exceptional circumstances: people preferred to follow social norms when they received a cheaper gift in public, and when they were displeased with a prior expensive gift.Contributions: These findings help shed light onto how people make price decisions when choosing a gift.Relevance/Originality: Understanding price decisions in the gift-giving context is surprisingly an underexplored topic in the marketing literature.Managerial Implications: Understanding how people make price choices is important to practitioners. For instance, retailers can adjust their assortments to offer products across different price ranges, and sales people can make better offers to customers based on how much they are willing to spend.

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisia Snyder

Sarah Scott's eighteenth-century novel Millenium Hall canvasses the role of gift-giving in the dynamics heteronormative-domestic, economic, and spiritual relationships. The pharmakon of the gift plays a central role in Scott's understanding of philanthropy, and the construction of her female-inhabited, female-run utopia. This article's principle occupation is to show that all instances of gift-giving in Millenium Hall create power-imbalances between the superior giver and the inferior receiver; however, Sarah Scott's female utopia constructs the most preferable type of subservience.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 360-371 ◽  
Author(s):  
SoYon Rim ◽  
Kate E. Min ◽  
Peggy J. Liu ◽  
Tanya L. Chartrand ◽  
Yaacov Trope

Gift-giving is a common form of social exchange but little research has examined how different gift types affect the psychological distance between giver and recipient. We examined how two types of gifts influence recipients’ perceived psychological distance to the giver. Specifically, we compared desirable gifts focused on the quality of the gift with feasible gifts focused on the gift’s practicality or ease of use. We found that feasible (vs. desirable) gifts led recipients to feel psychologically closer to givers (Studies 1-4). Further clarifying the process by which receiving a desirable versus feasible gift affects perceived distance, when recipients were told that the giver focused on the gift’s practicality or ease of use (vs. the gift’s overall quality), while holding the specific features of the gifts constant, they felt closer to the gift-giver (Study 5). These results shed light on how different gifts can influence interpersonal relationships.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (06) ◽  
pp. 2050082
Author(s):  
NORA ALTGILBERS ◽  
LOTHAR WALTER ◽  
MARTIN G. MOEHRLE

Frugal innovations enable companies to access new markets because of some specific characteristics. Typically, they focus on existing solutions as a blueprint, changing parts of their functionality while reducing the costs. Many companies are faced with the question how to find ideas for such frugal innovations. For this purpose, we introduce a method for the identification of frugal invention candidates and their qualification as frugal patents. We provide a general outline of a process and apply it to the medical engineering technology. By use of semantic analysis, we shed light on the moderating role of frugal attributes to qualify a frugal invention candidate as a frugal patent. The application produces a comprehensive set of frugal patents. Our approach deepens the understanding of frugality by providing an appropriate assessment based on a newly developed frugal thesaurus. Managers will have the option to adapt our method to their particular fields of experience.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pianpian Yang ◽  
Qingyu Zhang ◽  
Yuanyue Feng

PurposeWith the rise of social media, online tipping has developed markedly in recent years. Drawing on emotional accounting, this research examined the effects of pride-tagged money (PTM) and surprise-tagged money (STM) on online tipping. It examined the mediating role of self-inflation and the moderating role of the perceived importance of money in the proposed relationship.Design/methodology/approachFive experimental studies were conducted to test the hypotheses using ANOVA, SmartPLS3 and bootstrap analyses.FindingsThe results reveal that pride-tagged (vs surprise-tagged) money leads to higher self-inflation, which leads to an increased willingness to engage in online tipping. It illustrates that when the perceived importance of money is low, PTM results in a higher willingness to engage in online tipping than STM. However, when the perceived importance of money is high, the effect of PTM (vs STM) on the willingness to conduct online tipping is attenuated, and no significant difference exists in the willingness to engage in online tipping between people with PTM and those with STM. In addition, it shows that PTM (vs STM) leads to a higher amount of online tipping, and self-inflation mediates the proposed relationship.Practical implicationsPractically, web-based marketing managers should design programs (e.g. content that encourages users to feel pride in their achievements) that cause users to emotionally tag their money with pride as a means of increasing their willingness to engage in online tipping and to increase the amount of such tipping.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first evidence of how different sources of money influence online tipping.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Maria Salomon Arel

Abstract This article discusses the gift-giving behaviour of English merchants involved in the Russia trade in the Muscovite era. Drawing on a small, but growing body of historical literature relating to the role of gifts in the cultivation of mutually beneficial relations between people across the social spectrum in early modern Europe, it explores the various ways in which the English deployed the practice of giving to their advantage, both in England and in Russia. In particular, as ‘strangers’ in Russia who operated beyond the parameters of traditional kin- and community-based networks of support, English merchants (and other foreigners, such as their Dutch competitors) needed to both ‘befriend’ Russian clients on the ground in every-day trade and nurture relationships in high places to ensure smooth, profitable, and secure business. As the sources reveal, they engaged in a variety of gift-giving behaviours in building relationships with Russians advantageous to their enterprise.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Auriane Guilbaud

In this article, I claim that using Marcel Mauss’ The Gift can prove fruitful in analyzing pharmaceutical donations, the role of interests in gift-giving, the complex intertwining of the domains of the gift and commerce, and in contributing to a theory of social justice. Drug donations refer to the practice of giving medicines “for free,” outside of the drug market, with the ultimate goal of reaching populations in need. So an object (a drug) otherwise sold on the market (even if sometimes at a subsidized price), and usually subject to a specific commercial process, enters a different circuit and distribution system. Yet, even if drug donations seem to break with the logic of exchange constitutive of the market, they are intimately linked to market dynamics. This is especially true in the case of corporate drug donations, because of the nature of the donor and the presence of ulterior motives. Accordingly, this practice can be explained with the help of a Maussian understanding of the gift, where gift-giving is not disinterested and does not have to result from pure altruism, but can very well be part of a larger process of accumulating wealth and power.


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