Introduction - Massachusetts Institute of Technology



Introduction

Gifts are a popular form of social communication in many cultures. We give gifts to celebrate holidays, birthdays, professional achievements, weddings, etc.; we give them to friends and family members, to the person we hope to marry and to the person who delivers the newspaper.

Yet gifts are puzzling, especially to economists (Camerer 1988). They are quite inefficient: enormous amounts of money are spent on them each year, but they are often not what the receiver wants. One study, looking at the difference between what gifts cost to buy and the value placed on them by the recipients, estimated that $4 billion dollars was “wasted” on Christmas gifts alone (Waldfogel 1993). Why do people persist in this inefficient and expensive behavior. Can – and should – we make it more efficient?

Gifts are also puzzling to the people participating in the exchange. An entire industry of etiquette writers and department store gift advisors exists to help people figure out what is an appropriate present to buy. Holiday shopping is stressful, as people worry about who to give to, what to give, how much to spend. The rules of gift giving are in constant flux as one’s relationships and position in life change. Should you give different gifts to your sister now that you are a successful entrepreneur, not a struggling student? What about her gifts to you? The rules also change as society evolves. Courtship, for instance, has changed rapidly since the nineteenth century, bringing with it new types of relationships – the casual date, the steady, the online prospect. – unheard of in previous generations. Exchanging gifts, which means knowing what to give and when to give it, is a key part of defining these relationship. How do people learn the meaning of these gifts? How do they define the relationship?

Indeed, the more closely we look at the nearly universal cultural behavior of gift-giving, the more puzzling it becomes. Gifts are meant, at least on the surface, to be beneficent and beneficial. Yet much anxiety accompanies gift giving, for giving the wrong gift or in an incorrect manner is a serious social blunder. Receiving a gift may also be fraught with more tension than pleasure. Not only may the gift be not to one’s taste, but receiving a gift can imply acceptance of a relationship one does not seek, and can put one unpleasantly in debt to the giver.

If we look at gifts as signals, the puzzle makes much more sense. Personal gifts can signal the giver’s beliefs about the recipient and intentions for their relationship. They also signal the giver’s tastes, interests, wealth and cultural background. Gifts may function as signals not only to the recipient but to the community at large: the use of gifts as public signals of one’s identity and status is capable of motivating exorbitant acts of generosity (Mauss 1990 [1950]). When viewed as signals, the inefficiency of gifts is not irrational wastefulness, but a meaningful cost that adds to the reliability of the signal’s message.

Gift giving, with all its tensions, has a fundamental role in defining and strengthening social relations.

How gifts are given is part of what defines a culture, for they define relationships, mark significant events, and give meaning to many goods and actions. New communication technologies change cultures, and thus change the practice of gift-giving. The emergence of new social relationships, such as the community of contributors to an open source project or the friend known only through email, presents new roles to acknowledge through gifts. There are also new types of gifts – ones composed of information, of messages forwarded and code contributed. Furthermore, online commerce has changed the process of obtaining and presenting gifts. People publish wish-lists of items they’d like to receive, and objects from around the world can be bought and sent from the convenience of one’s desk, eliminating the need to enter a shop or interact with the recipient. These changes have certainly made gift-giving more efficient – but how have they affected the signaling function of gifts?

What are gifts?

At first it seems that a gift is easy to define. It is a special thing that someone gives you, wrapped in nice paper, the sort of thing one receives as a child at a birthday party. But there are many types of gifts. Some gifts are homemade, some are store-bought. A gift can be cash, but not all cash transactions are gifts. The same object, given between the same two people, can be a gift in some situations but not in others. If I give you a present, and you give me one, how is this different from barter? Why is it a gift when a man gives jewelry to one woman with whom he has a close physical relationship yet it is a payment for sexual services when given to another? Are all the things that come in wrapping paper and ribbon truly gifts? What about the free gift with purchase at the cosmetics counter?

The key element that separates gifts from other exchanges is that gifts are social. Their purpose is to establish, define or strengthen a social relationship.

Gift exchanges are thus the opposite of commodity exchanges. Commodities are bought and sold in market transactions, where the buyer and seller are each primarily interested in the objects and money exchanged; their concern with the other is simply as an agent effecting the efficient flow of goods and services through the economy. By contrast, the gift is given in social interactions, where the giver and receiver are primarily interested in each other and their relationship; here it is the object that is nearly incidental, of interest because it is instrumental in enhancing the interaction of giver and receiver.

In pure commodity exchanges, the objects are “fungible”, as are the buyer and seller. Fungible means “freely interchangeable with another”. The mass produced items bought at a typical chain store are fungible, at least until we take them home and make them our own. So are the people in the roles of cashier and customer: the customer goes to a cashier, but who the person in that role is does not matter and the cashier does not take much note of who is passing through their line. In gift exchanges, the item given is made unique simply by its role in that process: the generic vase becomes the-vase-Aunt Millie-gave-me-for-a-housewarming-gift and its value derives from the importance the receiver puts on the relationship with the sender, the meaning perceived in the gift’s signal, as well as its intrinsic value as an object or action. The identity of the giver and receiver and their relationship both shapes and is shaped by the meaning of the gift.

In the classic anthropological work on gifts, Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, gift exchange and commodity exchange are seen as opposing structures which characterize different societies. Subsequent studies have shown that they co-exist in many cultures – and even in the same transaction. In a neighborhood store, the proprietor may put aside a certain item for a favored customer – this is a market exchange, but there is also an element of the gift in it. The purpose of the exchange is not only to trade object and money, but to strengthen the relationship between owner and customer. And transactions that we think of as gift exchanges can have aspects of the commodity to them. The people lined up at the returns desk after Christmas, trading argyle sweaters for sequined tights or polka-dotted ties for plain blue ones, are turning gifts back into commodities.

Mauss’s writings about gifts emphasized the social - that gifts are a means of establishing and strengthening social bonds. He described gift giving as an endless series of reciprocal bequests: I give something to you, now you are indebted to me until you give me something, at which point I become indebted to you. The gift could be an active force in this process; he described, for instance, the Maori concept of hau, a force that resides within a gift that needs to return to its point of origin, to the original giver and the place where the gift came. In Mauss’s accounts the gift is an active object, embodying something of the giver, and enforcing reciprocity.

Mauss based his theories of the gift on “primitive” societies, and though he acknowledged that the practice of his day was to use such studies as “curiosities” or as lessons in how far modern society has come, he believed that there was much to be learned about modern society from them, both as the roots of modern practice and as a way of gaining a fresh perspective on the use and customs of gift giving. The form and context of contemporary gift-giving is very distant from that of the tribes Mauss describes, but there are important parallels between the blankets a chief distributes at a potlatch and diamond earrings in the Tiffany box the husband presents on Valentine’s Day.

• they are social

• they are reciprocal

• there is an element of power involved

• they serve as a display of status

Gifts are social: As discussed above, the key feature of gifts is that they establish, define or strengthen a social relationship.

Gifts are reciprocal: In Mauss’s world, reciprocity was explicit. The recipient of a gift was required to repay the gift, preferably with an even grander one. The forces[explain] that ensured reciprocity did so by making terrible misfortune fall upon those who did not reciprocate.

Yunxiang Yan, in his study of gift giving in the close-knit social networks of rural China, observes that “One cannot simply offer a gift in exchange for getting something done; this is considered insulting by the gift recipient. Instead, on must first actively participate in the endless cycle of cultomary gift-giving so as to cultivate one’s guanxi network. Then, when one needs help one can resort to other people in the network.” The reciprocity of gift giving is a way of signaling the social tie between the gift exchangers.

In In our world, reciprocating gifts is good form, but bears none of the life and death urgency that Mauss reported. In the tribal world Mauss observed, gift giving was the central form of exchange, vital to the life of the community; a breakdown in the rhythm of gift exchange would be economic collapse. In the modern world, market exchange has become the primary mechanism for distributing goods and services. Gifts are a significant part of the economy – Christmas presents alone account for [$$$?] annually – but few of us rely on gifts for daily shelter and sustenance. Even using the broadest definition of a gift, which goes way beyond the wrapped and ribbonned present, it is possible today to live, to work and obtain food and shelter, in the complete absence of social exchange and thus completely outside the world of gifts.

Fortunately, most of us do exist within a web of social relations, and thus, even if we are not big present givers, within a world of gifts.

The broadest definition of gifts includes all items exchanged and actions done within the realm of social rather than monetary relations (Carrier 1991). In this sense, offering someone a ride home is gift, cooking dinner for one’s family is a gift, making an effusive compliment is a gift. Even the way we control our emotions, conjuring up gaity for the host of a party or empathic sadness and anger for a friend going through a divorce, can be construed as a gift (Hochschild 1983). What is and what is not a gift is a matter of subtle judgment – and how it is determined is very dependent on underlying social and philosophical models of the observers. For Mauss and many of the writers who followed him, the key distinction was between gifts and commodities – that is, between the social and economic spheres. His work has thus been characterized as Marxist, though with an emphasis on how good circulate rather than on how they are produced (Carrier 1995). Within social and anthropological writing there has been considerable debate about the distinction between gifts and goods – do they constitute different worlds? Is this dichotomy artificial and is reality more of a continuum between them? (Appadurai 1986).

Another dimension of distinction for gifts is between gifts and bribes. Here too the theoretical distinction may be clear, but practice is muddier. Slipping $20 to a policeman to give you a warning rather than a ticket is clearly a bribe, but what about the various gifts, dinners, and entertainments that accompany business transactions? (Smart 1993) When are they unacceptable bribes and when are they part of the process of developing a relationship within the business world? These distinctions are slippery, and the criteria for making them are subtle and culturally subjective.

Is a tip a gift or a payment for services? If it is a gift, it is not taxable. If it is not, it is part of one’s wages, and thus taxable – but also considered part of one’s income when calculating compensation. [tips initiailly considered gifts, now are wages] Changing legal rulings trace the evolution of society’s assessment of what is a gift. (Zelizer 1997)

Finally, there is the distinction between gifts and everyday necessary tasks. If I make dinner for my family and set the table with candles and fine china, this may be easy to see as a gift. But what if I toss some take out burritos on the counter? When the baby’s mother changes a diaper, is this a gift to her husband? What about when the father changes it, is this a gift to his wife? Tension and resentment occur when one family member intends his or her actions as gifts yet they are perceived by another as simply the fulfillment of required duties [hochschild 2nd shift]. Changing notions of the family, of men’s and women’s roles have shifted expectations which can be seen via the disparities in ideas of what actions are gifts.

Much of the theory around gifts, whether legal or anthropological, has focused on the notion of reciprocity, though different ideas have been put forth. The idealized gift of Western culture is a gift because no reciprocation is expected – if one expects something in return, then it is not a gift. For Mauss and his followers, reciprocity is central to the notion of gift. Yet reciprocity has some problems when it is used as a defining feature (whether in its presence or its absence) in determining what is a gift. Very few gifts achieve the self-less ideal – in real world behavior, most gifts are reciprocated, this is the expectation – considered very rude not to – should we accept this definition, then gift giving very rare. On the other hand, understanding the distinction between the reciprocity of gifts and the balance that exists in other forms of exchange

Other notion – Zelizer – gifts imply “subordination and arbitrariness”. She shows how money – normally “neutral, impersonal and fungible” can be turned into a gift “meaningful, deeply subjective and non-fungible” (Zelizer 1996, 1997). She highlights how people make subtle distinctions between types of money.

What separates gifts from other exchanges is their social purpose. Gifts are used to define, establish and strengthen a relationship.

The tension around reciprocity is because if a gift defines a relationship the relationship is almost always two way – if I consider you my friend, then I hope you consider me yours. For equal relationships, then there should be (nearly) equal gifts. The subtle but important distinction is that I should be giving you the gift with no thought of getting gift in return – I need to be giving it to you as something that I do not expect a return on. However, I do hope that our friendship will be reciprocated, in which case, you would signal this to me with a gift at some appropriate time. Thus, if my interest is in the object, I will be expecting and hoping for reciprocity in order to get a nice present. If my interest is in the relationship I am still seeking a nice gift in return, not because I want the object, but because I want the signal of friendship.

The issues of deception etc. that people are on the lookout for here are not gifts that indicate say riches one does not have (though that may be the case also, but it is not specific to gifts) but rather for whether the sentiment underlying the giving of the gift is onest or not. Furthermore, the costs of the gift are born by boh the sender and the receiver: the sender spends the money or time to provide the gift, the recipient takes the risk of ending up with something s/he does not like. So, there is intense scrutiny of the way in which the gift is given – a high premium is put on the actons around it, that they show considerations, veneration, etc. Mauss describes how gifts that are not presented in the right manner may be rejected. Etiquette writers discuss the importance of the personal note, of some mark that shows the effort and regard that has gone into the gift.

A gift is a signal of paying attention to someone, of thinking of them, of spending both time and money on them. That is why the more efficient the gift becomes ,the less it can signal. The husband who sends his secretary out to buy a birthday present for his wife may end up with an object that the wife in fact likes more, but we see it as a lesser gift than the perhaps less attractive scarf he would have chosen himself. The money in either case is the same, but the gift is suppoed to e a signal of the time also. The wife who prefers to receive the well-chosen scarf is not interested in signals of her husbands caring for her. Either, less likely , she is so confident and secure in his regard she does not care if she gets this signal or she is so uninterested in how he thinks or whether he makes the effort for her, but she is focused more on the object, a sign that the relationship is in trouble.

Here I am arguing that a useful way of distinguishing between gifts and other forms of exchange has to do with signaling. Givts – or the gift part of an exchange since the same exchange may be incorporate both – are signals. They are two types of signals. The first is status and identity of the sender. In this way, they are like any other form of conspicuous and wasteful spending. The fact that I made a big donation, I bought everyone a round of drinks, I gave you a big ring, etc. says something about me – about my taste, about my financial status, in much the same way that money I might spend on myself does. But with some advantages. Lets say I buy a nice, and expensive, jacket for myself. It signals taste and money. I can also buy it for someone else as a gift. The recipient is the audience for the gift. They see the taste and money (complicated, as we’ll soon see, with ?s about the signal of my beliefs about them etc). From a handicap perspective, the gift may be a stronger signal say of financial wealth, since it is more wasteful for the giver: if I buy for myself, there is the benefit I get from having the jacket, being able to wear it, etc. When I give it away, however, I get no benefit (well, we’ll see about that) – it is gone from me. The question of whether I get a benefit from making the gift is complicated. The big public gifts, such as the potlatches described by Mauss or today’s charity balls are very useful from a signaling perspective since they ensure that the audience is paying attention. Throwing a huge party is a form of gift (wedding celebration) buy food for others, entertain them – but is very much a signal of one’s own identity.

The other type of signal that gifts embody is the signal indicating what the giver thinks of the receiver and of their relationship. The gift’s use for signaling this information that sets it apart from other exchanges.

The more interesting signals in gifts are the signals that indicate what the giver thinks of the receiver and of their relationship. [this embodies the social aspect of mauss’s observations, as well as zelizers and of course camerer. ] difference here is putting into formal signaling model. cost of the bet of knowledge.

1 Public vs. private gifts

The word gift lumps together two rather different types of giving: there are public gifts,

(Glazer and Konrad 1996) point out that signaling social status is a big motivation in contemporary charitable giving. They point out that anonymous donations are quite rare – generally less than 1% for most institutions. Other motivations for charitable giving that they propose are a desire to help the recipient and the “warm glow” of donating to charity. While the different motivations may exist simultaneously, the nearly universal desire for recognition demonstrates that the signaling aspect of charity giving is significant. They also note that in places where there are “buckets” of donations – one can be recognized for giving say $500-$999, $1000-$2000, etc. donations cluster at the lowest end.

They note that donations to charities can be a very useful way of signaling wealth. For instance, people may remain quite competitive with those with whom they attended school. Donations to educational institutions are very high – and the donors appear yearly with the amount they have given. These peers may be in far apart cities – unable to see the new car or big house, so the alumni magazine is the idea venue for this display.

Another intereting point – they do not make this – is that these types of donations are among the few places where one’s name is linked with a signal of status. In my city I may observe the grand houses, but for the most part I do not know who lives in each one. The lists of donors to museums, hospitals, shelters, etc. is what makes me aware of who are the wealthy and socially engaged in the town.

We see elements of this in the contemporary world: people take turns hosting dinners

T fromIn Mauss’s accounts, something of the giver remains with the gift. He describes the Maori belief of hau, a

This runs counter to the Western ideal of the altruistic gift which says that a gift should be given selflessly, with no thought of return. Interestingly, the idealized altruistic gift, like its seeming opposite, the entirely businesslike commodity exchange, is an asocial interaction. Something changes hands, but the hands are unseen, and the transaction does not bind the participants together. Mauss’s notion of gifts as pieces in an

The altruistic donation and the commodity exchange are both asocial (Osteen 2002). The most altruistic gift is the one given anonymously; the purest market exchange is also anonymous.

Or they can seem like a social tax: the office worker who must chip in several hours salary for a pooled gift for the boss may feel resent

Especially when they are trading a gifted item for a completely different one – the argyle sweater for sequined tights -

For Mauss, gift exchange and commodity exchange characterized different societies; subsequent anthropologists have shown that they co-exist in many cultures. Here I am using a fully integrated view, where

Gifts have been studied by anthropologists, sociologists and economists. One the most influential works is Marcel Mauss’s The Gift. Gifts, as Mauss defined them, were any object or service transferred as part of a social, rather than material, interaction (Carrier 1991; Mauss 1990 [1950]).

This does not mean that the object given as a gift is not valuable – indeed, it takes on a greater value because it has been given as a gift. Commodities are “fungible” – they are replaceable by other similar items (Carrier 1991). Gifts are not. Mauss noted that something of the giver remains with the gift, “that to make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part of oneself” (pg. 12). In the context of the Maori culture he was observing, this aspect of the self that remained in the gift was what motivated qreciprocity – the spiritual force that remained in the gift needed to be returned in the guise of another exchange. In contemporary Western culture, this is the “sentimental value” of the gift – the value it has over its value as a commodity.

In Western thought there is idealized notion of gifts as altruistic donations, where any thought of return detracts from their pureness. Mauss argued that this was not at all the case, but rather that gifts exist within a series of reciprocal exchanges whose function was to create and maintain relationships among individuals and groups For Mauss, gift giving was a representation of power: by giving a gift, the giver holds an advantage over the recipient, who is relieved of this subordinate position only by returning an equal or greater gift.

It is the social element that separates gifts from other forms of exchange. Gifts are things that are given to or actions that are done for one person by another in order to define and/or strengthen a social relationship.

In practice, the distinction between gift and commodity is fuzzy, and many transactions have elements of each. People return to the store gifts they did not like in exchange for items they prefer. In settings such as small stores and yard sales, the transactions between buyer and seller building a relationship as well as trading money for goods (Herrmann 1997). And the line between exchanges of gifts and payment for services can be very difficult to draw.

in mauss’s account the reason why gifts and the never ending reciprocity they demanded engendered social ties was bound up in the spiritual nature of the gifts – the maori explanation of hua, or spirits, that lived on in the gift and kept the recipient bound to the owner. the social demands of both giving and receiving that keep people in continuous interlocking binds with each other.

here we look at it from the perspective of signaling – that the gift is a signal (Camerer 1988; Prendergast and Stole 2001). The gift is a way of defining a relationship, of showing one’s understanding of the other.

Indeed, as we are using the term, the acts that most closely resemble the “perfect” gift – anonymous donations to charitable organizations, while called “gifts”, are really donations, a rather separate category.

Some gifts are coercive. This can be viewed benignly, for instance between parents and children – if you eat all your dinner, you’ll have dessert. If you get straight A’s, I’ll buy you a stereo. Indeed, the coercive gift is at the heart of one of modern America’s primary myths, Santa Claus. “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness sake”. The good child gets the gift, the bad child gets coal. When gifts are given to induce the receiver to behave well, they are called incentives. When they are given to induce the receiver to behave badly, to do something illegal or unethical, they are called bribes.

Tribute. The story of Puss In Boots [Fred M.] is an exemplary tale of tribute gifts as true gifts. In this tale, a cat brings fortune to his penniless master by hunting various tasty creatures and bringing them to the King as tribute gifts from the Marquis of Carabas, the name the cat makes up for his master. He does this many times, and the king becomes familiar with this name. The cat then tells his master to pretend to be drowning as the King is driving past; the cat runs to King’s procession to tell them of the Marquis of Carabas’dire predicament, and the king sends someone to rescue this mysterious and faithful subject who has brought him so many gifts. That the “marquis” has no rich clothing or jewels is conveniently explained with a tale of robbers who tossed him in the lake and left him to drown. The King lends him some fine clothes and after a series of events masterminded by the exceptionally cunning cat, the recently penniless master acquires both a vast estate and the King’s daughter in marriage, an amazing transformation brought about by the strategic use of gifts. Here, while the gifts are tribute, their purpose was to create a social relationship between the cat’s master and the King, at which they succeeded. They did this both by signaling the master’s social competence and grace, in the form of these repeated tributes, and his prowess, in the form of multiple fine hunting trophies.

The study of gift exchange is prominent in anthropology, starting with the writings of Marcel Mauss, most notable his book The Gift. Mauss defines gifts as any exchange whose context is social, rather than purely financial.(Carrier 1991; Mauss 1990 [1950]). This broadest definition of gift is still useful, though we will be using a somewhat narrower one. A gift is an act done for or an object given to another for the purpose of defining and/or strengthening a social relationship. Carrier’s definition can be too broad – for all of our language defines a social relationship, everytime we say hello to someone we are strengthening our relationship with them. And, in the broadest of all sense, perhaps that “hello” is a gift, but that becomes too broad to be useful.

The notion of reciprocality is tricky. On the one hand, unless we posit the existence of true altruism, then everything is done for some self serving purpose, even if it is tremendously beneficial to others. So, if I give you a beautiful watch, what is the expected reciprocality: there is money – I am a watch dealer and this is a purely business transaction; it is a in the guise of a gift, but I expect a specific return – favors, a better grade, etc – this is a bribe – that you would not have otherwise accorded to me; communication – you may change the way you think of, act toward me, because of the additional information you have about me, about wht I think of you. That is perhaps why the “gift with purchase” or other really commercial gifts, including ore personal ones, seem to ring so hollow – there is nothing of the communicative in their motivation, it is purely the desire to have increased future purchasing, etc.

This is why money can be a gift, though it is more challenging to make it one (Zelizer 1997). If it is earmarked for a specific purpose, that helps.

So as not to become too bogged down in finding the borders of what are gifts, let’s start by talking primarily about presents.

We have moved from a time when almost all transactions were social. In a pre-industrial age, one had a personal relationship with the makers of all the goods and services one consumed. You knew the baker who made the bread, the farmer who grew the meat, the shoemaker who made your shoes, etc. The process of obtaining any of these goods involved social exchanges, relationships developed over a lifetime. (See for example W. Cronon “nature’s metropolis” (Cronon 1991) page 26 – the fur trade depended on gift giving to establish relationships, and he also discusses in his book on New England how gift giving was used by Indians in their exchanges within and between villages). Modernization and industrialization have depersonalized the process of exchange – a trend that has reached an extreme with the rise of internet shopping. Today, I can buy many goods – indeed, pretty much all goods – from an online site – I never need see another person, neither maker nor merchant. While certainly more efficient, this has not only removed much of social from my everyday existence – in terms of obtaining the goods I need, I need never leave the house nor speak with another human being – it removes some of the meaning from the objects. [the market transaction has gone from being social, with elements of gifting, to purely commodity – with fungible products and people, to “frictionless commerce” [maes guttman moukas]] Perhaps it is part of the appeal of ebay that it returns some of the social and personal to transactions – that one looks not only at the object that one is buying, but at who is the buyer, who is the seller.

The other notion I am interested in here is how gifts make an item into something personal, the transformation of commodities into gifts. The notion of the commodity as fungible and of the participants in the commodity transaction as also fungible (Carrier 1991) – interactions in the store are impersonal – we deal with the clerk, with the role not the person. Even this has been removed online. The act of wrapping the gift also becomes impersonal. Where can we go with this? [what do we want to signal – if knowledge – the interesting story, the postcard, the gifts of music information, ]

for as Mauss also described, something of the giver remains in the gift – the gfit is a reminder of the person.

The process of industrialization has been one of deperson

The category gift is soft-edged, blurring into other categories of exchange and action. One anthropological view of gifts, in a tradition beginning with Mauss,

The purpose of a gift is to define and strengthen a social relationship.

The word “gift” has come to describe a wide range of things and actions. It can mean the personally chosen and carefully wrapped present; it can mean any decorative (i.e. useless) object whose purpose is to be given to others; it can mean a charitable bequest, named or anonymous; it can refer to an inborn talent – a gift from God or nature. In our definition, most presents are gifts, though the objects

In a non-gift exchange, the provider offers something which the receiver may choose to take or not, at which point there is an exchange of something of equal value: money, a different object or service, or the promise of future repayment. Gift exchanges are also reciprocal (Gouldner 1960), though many do not require immediate return. Holiday gifts may be immediately reciprocal – and here we see the issue of how a relationship is assessed being brought to immediate measure: it is embarrassing for both people when one person in a relationship buys say a Christmas or Valentine’s Day gift for the other and it is not reciprocated, or if the gifts are of vastly different scales: he gives her diamond earrings and she gives him a couple of CDs. The gift here is a signal of the giver’s assessment of the relationship, and the ideal is for both to assess it similarly.

The key differene is in the social element. The purpose of gifts is to strengthen, to commence or continue, a social relationship. In an exchange of commodities, the provider offers something, and it is the receiver’s choice of whether to take it or not, at which point there is an immediate exchange of something of agreed upon equal value (which could be apromise to provide that thing at a future date, i.ee a loan or credit) . So for our purposes, to understand if something is a gift, we must understand whether it is interened as something that affects the relationship between the parties. With this definition, there are somethings that may be called gifts that we are not considering here – these include anonymous charity – and indeed many types of charitable giving (which have a social function but differently). Typical gifts here are courtship gifts, gifts among friends and family to celebrate birthdays and holidays. There can be fuzzy areas. As we will see, the signaling function of non-monetary gifts is much higher than monetary or other generic gifts – what makes cash gifts still gifts in this definition?

Gifts to children

The notion of strengthening social relationships is also complex. Gifts are different than bribes, though they share some key elements. A bribe is something given to a person to entice him to do something he would not ordinarily do. I can bribe the watchman to look the other way, the politician to support the bill, the toddler to eat the vegetables. Gifts can have a briberous aspect –

Our discomfort with the gift as bribe underlies many of the rules about courtship gifts. [zelizer – examples of prper and improper gifts]. If the gift is given as a signal – I am giving you this lovely pin to let you know how much I care about you and what I think you deserve – then it is fine. But if it is a bribe – I am giving you this lovely pin and now I expect a bit more than just a kiss goodnight – it is not. Identifying which motivation lies behind a gift is very difficult and for the guardians of propriety, it was better to avoid any possibility of a bribe.

Part of wht distinguishes diffent types of gifts is what they are primarily signaling. If it is about what I think of you, vs what I am like vs a marker of our type of relationship. Very nuanced, of course, but, for instance, a favor is about what the receiver would want. It implies a debt – that you will “return the favor”. A charitable gift – is this really a gift – has little reciprocity to it. It is, perhaps, a gift to the community?

2 Exchange for strengthening social ties

This is what we are primarily interested in – how does the giving of something, be it an object, an action, or money – strengthen and define social ties.

Economists, sociologists, and anthropologists have struggled with defining what gifts are and what are their roles in different cultures. Here we will look at the signaling function of gifts – in particular, their signaling of one’s assessment of the other, assessment of the relationship, communicative competence in the arena of gift exchange, personal status of the giver.

All these categories are fuzzy, and their may be elements of the gift exchange in commoty exchanges (which is hwat Hermann discusses, and also think of a small proprietor who makes sure that favorite customer gets the best cut of meat or puts aside an object that customer would like (common in art/antique trade) – here we can say there are gift-like aspects to these exchanges. [does this have some relevance to the “personalization” that is a buzzword of online commerce – on the one hand, there are things that I would like to fit for me etc – and on the other hand there is the exploitation of the personal relationship – the amazon shop that has specials just for me, that knows what I would like. Here we see something that had both a utilitarian and a signaling aspect when done by a human – utilitarian in that I liked to get the special object that would indeed be something I wanted, but also signaled that there was a special relationship between the storeowner and me, that they remembered me, had made the effort to think of me, that I stood out in their memory. there is a always an ambiguity about commercial transactions: do they remember me because they think I am charming, lovely, etc. or because they think I’ll spend a lot of money in their store? in the world of automated commerce, the memory, the prediction of what you will want is always there – collaborative filtering is a technique for making that prediction – so you have all the utility but none of the signal – the object as gift imlies a singularity – I can make a gift of my teime and effort finding the right thing for you if I am a storeowner with a n inventory of mass produced objects, but it is only if I put something aside specially for you (implying that others cannot have it if you want it) that it is really giftlike?

[it is one of the advantages of being poor or at least of being perceived as poor, that one may get a more honest assessment of one’s personal charms. the less others have to gain from you, the more one can discover about whether a) they are nice and b) what they think of you beyond the immediate question of what they can get from you. this is a staple of fairy tales – the versions of Cinderella where the fairy godmother first appears as a penniless beggar woman or an injured bird; the breadmakers daughter from strange tales;

1 Gracious acceptance – the thought that counts

Children are taught, with some difficulty, to say thank you

2 Use changes with culture

Gift giving greatly increased in late 19th century with the growth of consumer society. Birthday celebrations, which had been previously rare, became an occasion for gift giving. New holidays, such as mother’s day, were invented.

3 Cash and gifts

The existence of cash gifts as gifts – if we assume the primacy of the signaling model, the question isn’t why aren’t all gifts cash, but why are any gifts cash. Look to Zelizer for notion of earmarking – when someone gives you cash, may often be marked as for a particular thing – they are not giving you generic cash, but cash to be used for a special something.

3 What do gifts signal?

Gifts communicate many things – they indicate what the giver thinks of the receiver and of their relationship. They provide cues about the giver’s taste, talents, and social competence. (Camerer 1988; Smith and Bird 2003)Colin Camerer

1 Giver’s understanding of relationship

What does he think of me? What is the status of our relationship? Gift giving is a way of communicating these thoughts.

Ritual gift giving – at holidays such as Christmas and Valentine’s Day and for events such as birthdays, weddings and graduations – forces people to make these signals. The suitor who has made his feelings about a relationship difficult to read is forced to make some declaration of them at Valentine’s Day or on his girlfriend’s birthday, for gift of some sort is expected and even the lack of one is itself a significant cue.

The interpretation of the lack of a present hinges on whether the non-recipient sees it as an unintentional cue (he forgot, he’s often forgetful, he’s terribly contrite) or a signal (he’s telling me something by ignoring this day).

The choice of a gift signals the giver’s assessment of the relationship and of the receiver. The nuances are complex. For example, in our culture a plant is a neutral gift, generally acceptable even if the recipient is not particularly fond of plants. It is the kind of gift you can bring to the hostess when invited to dinner at the home of someone you barely know. A plant requires care, so it carries an inherent message that the recipient is deemed to be competent and nurturing enough to care for it. For those for whom that is an uncertain estimation, such as children and the highly rebellious, the gift can have deeper meaning. For a child, the gift of plant can be a signal that the giver believes the child has reached a certain level of maturity – able to remember to water it correctly etc. For the very rebellious – the one who has rejected stability and nurturing – the gift may be (or be seen to be) a message of disapproval or of willful subtle defiance of the recipient’s lifestyle.

The specifics of the gift, the type of plant, is also part of the message. For the black-clad tattooed and pierced goth, (for black clad and tattooed Sue) while most plants might seem at best ill-suited, the hostile plants – the meat-eating ones, the cactus – plants that commit violence, inflict pain – can be an insightful gift, one that bridges gap between say mild-mannered Uncle Jack and hardcore niece Sue. Similarly, a gift of a frilly plant with pink flowers may seem too close to a floral gift for a masculine recipient.

A plant is a neutral gift, well suited as a house gift from a guest, etc. It’s neutrality, however, can be a potent message when the relationship warrants a more intimate or romantic gfit. If Sue is indifferent to plants and Jack, her boyfriend of two years, gives her a plant for Valentine’s Day, the gift may be hurtful – Sue may feel that it is too impersonal a gfit, one the that shows no understandngin about who she is, about how well Jack knows her, or about the significance of their relationship.

Gifts communicate something about how the giver feels about the receiver and their relationship, but is it a signal? It is, because it is an intentional communication about a idden quality.

Here the quality is what does the giver think about the receiver and their relationship they have. It also provides a number of perhaps unintentional cues

If Jack is Sue’s boyfriend of a couple of years, I am fairly indifferent to plants, receiving one for Valentine’s Day signals a a crtain

Any gift that is not liked, that is not

Jack gives a gift of a plant to Sue. Normally a neutral gift, a nice thing to bring to dinner. But the nuances of the signal depend on the specifics of Jack and Sue’s interests, their relationship, and

- book or cd – the category is neutral but the particular choice of object is highly personal. Difficult to give to a stranger – makes many assumptions about their taste. Also is a statement about the taste of the person who gave it, as generally you give something as a signal of your own taste – I like this music nd thought you would too. Gift as a signal of presumed common ground. Here the more neutral choices – a current best-seller, say – are statistically more likely to find someone who likes them, but for those who do not, the presumption of this taste can stand out as a sign of not knowing them.

the signal that the giver thought they were a plant liker is an acceptable mistake. As one gets to know the other better, the meaning changes. A closer friend would be expected to know whether or not one liked plants. If yes, if the recipient is a serious gardener, an exotic plant or one in their specialty would be a gift that signaled knowledge of their interests, but a generic geranium would be in the category of too-neutral a gift

A gift can be too thoughtful. A gift that indicates that you have knowledge of the recipient that they would not expect you too have can make you seem too eager or too inquisitive. If you have kept your hobbies to yourself, a co-worker who you know very slightly should not necessarily signal his knowledge that you collect little purple figurines. The interpretation of such signals is quite subjective – I may think it is nice that you bothered to find out more about me and my interests – and here, the deliberate signaling of more knowledge than the existing friendship would support can be an offer of deeper friendship, an indication at least of interest in pursuing a friendship. Or it may b e unwelcome or creepy – the recipient may not want to have any closer relationship to that person; they may find this action intrusive.

The generic gift, given to a person with whom one has a genric relationship, Is fine by definition. it is an indicator of cultural competence; both parties may well know that neither is that fond of geraniums, but it is

- the giver’s assessment of the type/closeness of the relationship – how intimate is it (do I give a neutral book? a personal book? jewelry? underwear?)

Signficance of the receiver to the signaler – people look to see what that person has spent on them, whether it is money, time, effort, imagination. Knowledge of a person’s circumstances can help here – not tryting to see how rich they are, but given how rich they are, how generous were they. $1 from someone with little may be more generous that $100 from someone with a lot more.

Assessment of the relationship – both in terms of the cost they spent, but also in how intimate or not the gift was. IA close friend or romantic partner is expected to put some thought into gift, into showing that it is personal. Shows understanding of appropriateness. The level of difficulty in doing this can be seen in the amount of advice about gift giving that is written, the existence of professional gift advisors in stores, etc.

1 Personal assessment

2 Power

Parental gifts are a statement of power. The anthropological accounts of gifts are often about power [cite – discuss – Mauss, especially

Mauss: "What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?"p3

The object retains something of the giver .Mauss: “objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them”.p 31. This is the notion of inalienability . Commodity exchange – the object completely changes hands - notion of private property. Gifts are forever associated with the giver. This, according to Mauss, is what compels reciprocity – creation of a debt.

Giving a large gift – especially one that the other needs, is a form of power play.

Courtship gifts – warnings against accepting large gifts, because of the obligation to repay that they entail.

3 Risky statement

“it’s the thought that counts” – but that thought must be backed up with some cost.

As Prendergast asked, would it not be more efficient to tell the person what you were thinking of getting for them and then give them the cash equivalent. This way, they’d know what you intended to do, and if you were wrong, if it was not something they would like, then they could spend the money on something they would prefer.

Sometimes, people do basically that. They purchase gift certificates from specialty stores or give cash with a note to spend it on nice clothes, or a fun treat, etc. One tradeoff here is that the monetary aspect of the gift is very clear – you know that they spent exactly $10 or $100 on you. Such gifts do not lend themselves to reciprocity – if I give you $100 for your wedding, then two months later you give me $100 at mine, the exchange seems more like the repayment of a loan than the mutual exchange of gifts. There are cultural rules governing the use of money received as a gift: one should spend it as the giver earmarked, whether explicitly or implicitly. Usually, it is meant for more enjoyable purposes than regular earned money: it is not, in general, for use in paying utility bills.

Here, we see an interesting interplay between cultural expectations and signaling. A purely signaling model of gift giving would say that only those who were sure of what the other would like would make the costly signal of buying the gift. By choosing and purchasing a gift, they signal that they are confident in their assessment of the relationship and of their knowledge of the other person. Those who were less confident would give money instead. Yet there are a complex set of cultural norms that govern when someone can give money rather than a specific gift.

We see this, for example, at weddings.. Some guests know the bride and groom very well, while others may have never met them before (business associates and distant cousins of the bride’s mother) there is a palette of gift giving opportunities. Closer friends may personally choose a gift, while those who know them less may give money, or, increasingly, choose an item from a gift registry. Those closest to the wedding couple may also choose to give cash; here, efficiency may be key reason. Being so close, they need not signal their knowledge of the couple’s taste or the state of their relationship – these are not in question. Instead, they can provide the couple with the most practical of presents. This is not to say that all parents enjoy unambiguously close relationships with their children – the choices of what gift to give are partially shaped by individual circumstances, but also by cultural norms.

We should also look at who is paying the cost of the signal. If I spend $100 to give you a gift of cash or to give you, say, a pink and yellow polka-dot sweater, in either case the monetary cost to me is the same. Giving you the sweater is also a cost in effort – I may have spent quite a lot of time shopping for that special item. With the sweater, the recipient pays a cost if the item is not suitable: there is the opportunity cost of having received something they do not like whereas the same money could have purchased them something they did want or need, as well as the cost of being gracious about something you do not like (which in the case of a sweater can extend to wearing it on occasions when I will see you).

it is the fact that gifts do have an cost – and to the extent that that cost is being spent on the signal and not on something else that gifts can be quite controversial. If we are a couple with a limited budget and you spend a large fraction of that on a piece of jewelry for me and I think it should have been spent on new brakes for the car, we will be in disagreement – but the crix of the disagreement is about the importance of the signal. One member feels it is important to signal in this way wheras the other does not (and there may of course be other motvations – the man who buys his wife diamond earrings is not only signaling to her something about how he feels/believes about her, but to the outside world about the state of their finances, relationship etc. It is a public display.

4 Cultural competence

The economists are interested in the nature of the inefficiency. The complexity of the signal provides many reasons for the gift not to be the equivalent of the commotiy, where the value is purely in whether one likes the object or not. Here there is in addition to the giver’spersonal assessment of the receivers taste, the whole gamut of social conventions about particular types of gifts. The ability to follow shuch conventions is one signal – do you know the right thing to give at the right time – this is what etiquette books etc. deal with. Again, how this emerges is a different question – we can critique it by saying that it is promulgated by parts of society that have a strong self interest in getting people to spend – consumer culture has shaped a great deal of our gift giving habits. That said, they have become part of our cultural expectations, whether it is for birthday presents, Christmas, Hanukkah, mother’s day, valentines day, etc.

2 Giver’s understanding of receiver

- the giver’s assessment of the receiver's taste. (risk in making the wrong assessement. if to impersonal, likely to be

Assessment of the giver’s taste – this is what is covered in the non-monetary nature of gifts papers in econ. Does the giver understand the taste of the recipient?

3 What the giver wants the receiver to be

Gifts can communicate what the giver would like the receiver to be. [health club membership. Gifts to kids of pink swaters for tomboys, electronic sets for children of engineers, college sweatshrts,. Grooming aids. Sexy lingerie to the wearer of cotton briefs. A calling card. These are what motivates a lot of the anger in receiveing presents. There is a lot of implied criticism of n such gifts, for they make it clear what the sender has noticed about the receiver and thinks should change. Children get these gifts a lot. There is an implied power play here 0 these are not the gifts one gets for the person who is one’s superior. Note that if the receiver has made it clear they wish to change, and that is not necessarily supported by the sender, but the gift supports the receivers desire, then i

4 Giver’s qualities – knowledge, skill, money

Gifts also communicate information about the giver’s interests, skills, money, etc. People give others books that they themselves like, share music they like. It is seldom that one gives a gift that one thinks the receiver will like though the giver does not – for there is an implied endorsement in the giving of a gift. (Though sometimes a gift that is not of the giver’s taste can be a way of signaling thoughtfulness, especially in a close relationship where both people know each other’s tastes well, particularly if they share things. The gift that will be appreciated only by the receiver is a way of ensuring the gift is whilly for that person, not a sneaky way of getting oneself something. If Jack and Sue live together and Jack buys Sue a pair of tickets to a basketball game as a present, it is self-serving if he wants to go more than she does, but beneficially sacrificial if he does not like basketball (doubly so if he will accompany her – this may be an underperceived cost – he will be bored and miserable, but she finds it so fun may not be able to realize how little he likes it).

1 Cost of gift – time, effort

“When her husband asked her two years ago what she wanted for her birthday, she instructed, ‘Make it hurt.' Thus the 11-carat diamond.” Interview with Gigi Levangie Grazer, author and wife of a very rich Hollywood producer.

the cost that went into obtaining the present – notion of gifts as search (time, knowledge), cost in money, time and effort (home made gifts)

5

6 Gifts as signals

It is important to note that as signals, gifts can signal many things, and are effectively costly only in the domains in which there is a cost. In terms of how well someone knows another – well, that can be a signal itself, the right book orfunny thing, etc – it is an indexical signal, in that it is not possible or difficult for thosewho do not know you well (though of course there is the solution of asking a friend, etc. but this has to do with the cost of knowing tht thing a bout the other – if I publish a wishlist on the web, knowing my taste is pretty low cost. For others, it is also low cost, but they may be more inters

Gifts can be aout how much would you spend on me – unlike other forms of signaling wealth, these are directed signals. May be “wasteful” to spend $$ on diamonds – but for recipient, transfer of wealth, not only observed signal of it. Complex in closer relationships, depending on how separate or entwined the pairs finances are.

4 Found in all cultures

1 Animals

Several animals have evolved gift giving as part of their courtship ceremony.

“Nuptial gifts are food items or inedible tokens that are transferred to females during courtship or copulation [1–3]. Tokens are of no direct value to females, and it is unknown why females require such worthless gifts as a precondition of mating.” (LeBas and Hockham 2005)

2 Primitive

Gift giving has been a staple of anthropological investigation. Most famous account is Marcel Mauss’s The Gift. It is unclear if many of the exchanges documented in these accounts (or in the ethological) are so different from the contemporary phenomenon as to be a different social custom altogether, or are there deep insights to be fund by comparing the two

3 Contemporary cultures

Gifts are given in many situations. In part because of our rapidly changing social relationships, the type of gift that should be given – what is acceptaible, what does it mean, what is the correct thing to do or say – changes rapidly.

The culture of gift-giving comes from past practices. And, there are other forces that contribute to it. Ours is a consumer culture, where billions of dollars are spent each year enticing people to buy more things, desire more things. Pepole need to negotiate their way through a complex of cultural meanings, from traditional rules, to changing expectations.

4 Future

The importance of inefficiency

Efficiency is the objective of online commerce, and this has carried into the world of gifts. has a popular “wish list” feature that allows users to create lists of items they would like to have; these lists can be sought by friends or exported to one’s homepage or blog. Sites such as allow users to easily create public wish-lists with items from any site on the web. These explicit declarations of the items one wants makes gift-buying much more efficient. The sender can simply pick something from a list and know it will be liked by the receiver.

1 A puzzle to economists

Gifts are a puzzle to economists, because they are very inefficient. A lot of money is spent on them, but they are often just not what the receiver wants. The unwearably gaudy tie is but one of the many clichés of unwanted presents.

Cash gifts are far more efficient. The giver need only figure out the right amount to give, and the receiver will put the money to the use that maximizes her own utility. Yet in many situations, cash is not viewed as an acceptable present. In fact, cash makes up only 10-15% of all gifts. (Prendergast and Stole 2001; Waldfogel 2002). The other 85-90% of the many billions of dollars we spend on gifts goes to much riskier and less efficient non-monetary presents[1].

This inefficiency is expensive . A study that looked at the difference between the actual cost of gifts and their value as objects (aside from sentimental value) to the recipient, $4 billion dollars a year was estimated to be “wasted” yearly on Christmas gifts alone (Waldfogel 1993) Why do people persist in this inefficient and expensive behavior? Can – and should – we make it more efficient?

1 Bad gifts in literature

Baby Belle getting a doll in Gone away lake.

George and Martha – “The Gift” – the cuckoo clock

2 Designers aim to make things efficient

1 Lose important costs

3 Why is inefficiency good

1 signaling

Yet this focus on efficiency eliminates the important communicative function of gifts. Gifts are signals. (Camerer 1988). The uncertainty that they resolve is the question of how well do you know me? What do you think I am like? The fact that the donor chose the gift is an essential part of the gift. Prendergast and Stole point out that a gift may be too easy – if it is known without a doubt that the recipient wants a particular item, that gift is the equivalent of giving cash. “The gift only has signaling value if there is a reasonable possibility that an unknowledgeable donor could get it wrong.”

4 Wishlists

Gift giving is complex social act. As givers, we need to figure out what type of gift is appropriate and how much to spend. An item of jewelry might be in the right price range, yet be inappropriately intimate; a cash gift might be acceptable at certain events but not others, even between the same people. As public wish lists become common, we need to understand how they fit into our existing customs, and how to use them effectively, not only efficiently.

1 efficient gift giving

2 lose signaling value

3 when is this useful?

For some relationships, the wish list is very useful. For example, some people who provide a free online service, such as writing shareware or maintaining a FAQ, publish a wish-list as a way to be thanked for their effort; here the sender is not expected to know their taste and yet cash is not appropriate. It can work too for close friends or family who feel no need to further signal their understanding of the recipient’s taste. The signaling loss of the wish-list is most significant for new and changing relationships, where communicating information about how well you know the recipient, how well you can gauge their tastes and interests is key.

The evolving meaning of gifts

1 Social augmentation

As our social life grows with technologies that augment social relationships, how will the customs of gift giving adjust to this ? I think that we will still want others to know the same things about us, what we are like, what Is the measure of the relationship. It is interesting to note the difference between the clear distinctions of the articulated social network, where the designers seem to think that labeling a relationship as friend or close friend, ec. is legitibame, and the extremely unuanced view that gift giving gives us of how people actually make these distinctions. With gifts, people struggle to think what is the right level of gift – how formal, intimate, expensive personal, as well as in those categories, what would that person want. If I am buying a novel or a CD, fairly neutral gifts, the fact that it is one of those things suits the level, but the choice of which book, which CD, can say a lot about the individual relationship.

Why is gift giving so difficult – which is perhaps good – how can we reclaim this difficulty for the nuancing of social networks. One piece is that the nuances of the gift are to some extent private (though some gifts do go on public display – but these are the most generic – the wedding presents that are publicly displayed, of vases, etc.

The advantage of the gift is that it lets us make this evaluation in a spirit of wrmth and generosity.

2 What are gifts in virtual communities

1 Software as gift – open source model

The notion that contributions to online discussions are gifts appears in (Kollock 1998). He sees them as not like gifts because they are to the community as a whole and not an individual as a way that these actions differ from gifts. But in fact this makes them very similar to the type of gifts that Mauss was discussing – the huge potlatch that was given. Here the key is the cost to the giver – it is about reputation, about showing off one’s ability to all, about the raising the bar for such action.

The key to seeing Mauss’s observations as relevant to design here is that the communities that Mauss was discussing a) were highly stratified b) depended on the gifts to maintain social welfare c) gift giving grand and ceremonial. The potlatch is differentiated from the normal ordinary contributions one makes to the society as a whole – that is one’s responsibility as a member of the society. This is where we get into trouble with too broad a definition of gift – yes, I can see every dish I wash as a “gift” to my family, but it removes a) some of the meaning from gift as a special thing – either bigger, more ceremonial, etc. Gets into various cultural/political arguments about household contribution. The second shift deals with these mismatched notions of what is expected contribution, what is gift. But perhaps that is useful after all, the family having such tight binds, such intense sociability, held together with continual mundane gifting

The key lesson we can get from looking at these contributions as gifts is the importance of maintaining the tie between the gift and the giver. This has been noted before, in terms of reputation as motivation, b

2 Virtual gifts

There are several papers addressing the gift as a metaphor or framework for understanding online or other mediated communication.

1 Need to understand to know if metaphor is valid

2 Open software as gift

There is a considerable literature, deriving from Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar, that looks at contribution to open source software as a form of gift. have talked with students, notably aaron, about this, and critique of the theory is that the key here is in creating good code. This is a signal of your ability, enhances your reputation, but is it a gift? is there a ceremonial/ritual aspect of the gift that is missing? If we say it is not, what can we learn from what gifts are? Is there a role for gifts in this community – and if so, is software the right means or is there some other method that might work better?

Not all contributions to the community are in the form of gifts.

Discussion of (Bergquist and Ljungberg 2001) on open source and gifting – this is an interesting model because the only way that it works is if we see the development of the community around an open source projct as paramount – and the providing of the code as a gift as a way of cementing that relationship. I think the analogy is forced. Perhaps a better one is with looking at hunting/gathering in tribal communities, where obtaining food is a full time necessity, but certain ways of doing it are more valorized than others.

So if a gift is to strengthen a social relationship, the signaling value of the choice of the gift derives from a couple of things. One, as (Prendergast and Stole 2001; Waldfogel 2002) noted, is the non-monetary aspect – that the sender is signaling his beliefs about what the receiver is like and would want. Is also providing cues about his understanding of the relationship, not only of the scale and intimacy, but about what is the balance of power, etc. (see zelizer)

3 Calls as gifts

3 Courtship gifts

Here we can look at the signaling nature of gifts in courtship.

Notion here is that the male, with his ability to go off with little care in parental dutues, etc. may be requeseted by the female in advane to make a significant investment. Here, there is the investment itself – most people cannot afford to buy multiple expensive engagement rings – as well as the signal it gives of increasing commitment and intimacy, as well as knowledge of partner, knowledge of world (search), etc.

1 Animals

Some of these are in the animal world – the ethology of courtship gifts among dung beetles, bower birds, apes, etc.

2 Evolutionary bio

3 Complex social nuances

Russian dating site includes handy form fo r sending chocolates, flowers, stuffed animals (for children) etc.

“Cam girls” and wish lists. Zelizer writes about the difficultires of giving gisfts in the context of courtship. Gift giving is important process in courtship, as the hidden qualities one is seeking to find out –

Another way of looking at gifts is from the recipients standpoint. Here we see that there is a social convention to give a gift – you are a friend at Christmas time, or you are a girlfriend on valentine’s day, on a birthday, etc. You know that there is a gift coming to you – it is the custom. To what extent do you make it explicit what you would like? If you do not, you run the risk of receiving something you do not like. If you do not care to find out what the sender knows about you, but are more concerned with the gift, be more explicit (cam girl wish list as extreme version). If you want to know what they will do, say nothing, or, as is common, say don’t want anything. The wrong gift may be due to lack of knowledge of you, or of lack of competence. If time has made you sure that it is lack of competence, i.e. are confident in knowledge, in relationship

4 Online dating

what would gifts accomplish in an online environment. What sort of things would be possible. Obviously once you meet someone you can graciously send them something. But what about before? There is the same gender inequality as many more men seeking. How to stand out? The wishlst is a way of indicating taste is inapproptriate because it looks like a campaign to be given things. Furthermore (and this is in Zelizer) for women romantic gifts can come with an aura of sexual coercion – I gave this $30 bouquet to you, now I expect you to kiss me. The idea of paying for something in a dating arena Is very delicate subject. And, me do want want to feel exploited – what of the woman who realizes she can string 20 men along with no intenion of seeing any of them, in order to receive more gifts?

So, the notion of a gift that has some real cost to the sender, that says something about the senders assessment of the receivers taste , yet does not open itself for exploitation – what about the notion of giving to charity in someone’s name (thanks to francis lam personal correspondence) . . I think this is an interesting concept. Most of the thime when this is done there is some sort of – can leave money to a specific charity in lieu of gifts, or flowers (e.g. often for funerals) but here the idea is that you could choose from numerous charities – some perhaps quite obscure, some controversial, provocative, etc. as a way to signal seriousness of intention, and assessment of recipient. Gifts to united way or the American red cross are like flowers – safe, a little dull. Religious ones can have all kinds of ramifications – from whether one sharesa religion, to whether one is in the liberal or conservative side of it. Similarly, gifts to things like greenpeace, a symphony orchestra, a political organization etc. ca be very loaded, provocative. “In honor of” publicly connects the person to the thing.

Notes:

1 From Offer(Offer 1997)

Gifts (reciprocal exchange) when involves personal interaction (but which is cause and which is effect?) There is material gain (possibly) from the exchange, but over and above that is “regard”. Interpersonal interaction.

Priced markets preferred when information scarce and good cheap and identitcal. “economizes on costly information” used when efficiency of production ahead of communication and cognition

2 From Herman (Herrmann 1997):

1 re mauss

gift binds giver and recipient. something of the giver remains as part of the gift – and the gift binds them through interdependence and/or reciprocity.

Appadurai and other anthropologists have placed gifts and commodities in opposition to each other. Today more nuanced view, showing how they can coexist in the same society. Appadurai does note that objects go in and out of commodity status in the process of exchange. I will argue that again there is an issue of intentionality – that it is the intention of the giver that really distinguishes commodity from gift from bribe. We are looking at gifts as signals, and the signal is about the intention, the communication. There is an element of the object exchange in gifts (and the wishlist highlights this); there is also the coercive element – the bribe is entirely coercive – but the gift can have coercive elements too. Our concern is not so much in defining gifts in opposition to commodity exchange or bribery, but it saying that in the realm of things we call gifts a key piece is that they are signals – that they are about intentional communication.

2 singularity

from kopytoff – the biography of things – each time something changes hands, etc. it becomes more singular. Here there may again be an interesting section - Hermann says that Mauss says that there is an inalienability about gifts, that something of the giver remains part of the gift. This is a more difficult concept to get across perhaps in contermporary western life when so many of our gifts are without much of the hand of the person who made it – that the hand made gift, on the one hand, which is very much about the giver, a token of self is much more personal than the store bought gift, which at least had the labor of the shopping in it, the fact that the giver handled and wrapped it – to the impersonal extreme of the object that is ordered online and the giver has never actually seen or touched that item. So, one aspect of returning the giftedness to exchange is what makes such things more personal – clearly, anyone who has looked at an online shopping bag knows that “gift” is common – what can be done to improve that. What are the gifts of the future?

3 From Carrier (Carrier 1990)

Conclusion

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. In The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Bergquist, Magnus and Jan Ljungberg. 2001. The power of gifts: organizing social relationships in open source communities. Information Systems Journal 11, no. 4: 305-320.

Camerer, Colin. 1988. Gifts as Economic Signals and Social Symbols. The American Journal of Sociology Organizations and Institutions: Sociological and Economic Approaches to the Analysis of Social Structure 94, no. Supplement: S180-S214.

Carrier, James. 1990. Reconciling Commodities and Personal Relations in Industrial Society. Theory and Society 19, no. 5: 579-598.

________. 1991. Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations: A Maussian View of Exchange. Sociological Forum 6, no. 1: 119-136.

________. 1995. Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism Since 1700. London, UK: Routledge.

Cronon, William. 1991. Nature's Metropolis. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co.

Glazer, Amihai and Kai A. Konrad. 1996. A Signaling Explanation for Charity. The American Economic Review 86, no. 4: 1019-1028.

Gouldner, Alvin W. 1960. The Norm of Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement. American Sociological Review 25: 161-178.

Herrmann, Gretchen M. 1997. Gift or Commodity: What Changes Hands in the U. S. Garage Sale? American Ethnologist 24, no. 4: 910-930.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

International Council of Shopping Centers. 2004. 2004 Holiday Watch.

Kollock, Peter. 1998. The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace. In Communities in Cyberspace, ed. Marc Smith and Peter Kollock. London, UK: Routledge.

LeBas, Natasha R. and Leon R. Hockham. 2005. An Invasion of Cheats: The Evolution of Worthless Nuptial Gifts. Current Biology 15: 64-67.

Mauss, Marcel. 1990. The Gift. Translated by W.D. Halls. New York: W.W. Norton. Original edition, 1950.

Offer, Avner. 1997. Between the gift and the market: the economy of regard. The Economic history review 50, no. 3: 450-476.

Osteen, Mark 2002. Gift or Commodity? In 2002 Midwest Modern Language Association Panels, Minneapolis, MN.

Prendergast, Canice and Lars Stole. 2001. The non-monetary nature of gifts. European Economic Review 45, no. 10: 1793-1810.

Smart, Alan. 1993. Gifts, Bribes, and Guanxi: A Reconsideration of Bourdieu's Social Capital. Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 3: 388-408.

Smith, E. A. and R. Bliege Bird. 2003. Costly signaling and prosocial behavior. In Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: On the Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life, ed. Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd and Ernst Fehr. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Waldfogel, Joel. 1993. The Deadweight Loss of Christmas. American Economic Review 83, no. 5: 1328-36.

________. 2002. Gifts, Cash, and Stigma. Economic Inquiry 40, no. 3: 415-427.

Zelizer, Viviana A. 1996. Payments and social ties. Sociological Forum 11, no. 3: 481-495.

________. 1997. The Social Meaning of Money. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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[1] An estimated $50-72 billion dollars is spent each year on holiday gifts alone – that from 1993, so probably much higher now (Waldfogel 1993). 2004 estimate of the average consumer expected to spend $703 on holiday shopping (but not clear average of what – Americans? American adults? ) (International Council of Shopping Centers 2004)

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