Gift-giving is a typical consumer behavior with important implications for consumers and marketers. Accordingly, consumer gift-giving behavior has received much attention from marketing scholars. We conduct a bibliometric analysis of 237 articles on gift-giving from the Web of Science database. This analysis identifies the bibliometric attributes of the gift-giving literature, including its publication trend, influential outlets, impactful articles, prolific scholars, international scope, state of collaboration, and featured topics and themes. Using content analysis, we identify three themes that categorize the consumer gift-giving literature's key segments: (1) broad and nuanced outlooks of the social side of gift-giving, (2) the less pleasant side of gift-giving, and (3) the foundational research on consumer gift-giving. This paper provides readers with a state-of-the-art overview of consumer gift-giving literature and identifies opportunities for future gift-giving research.
We explore gift givers' and gift recipients' preferences concerning gifts that compare unfavorably to givers' own products. Across eight studies, we demonstrate that givers refrain from giving gifts that compare unfavorably to their own possessions more often than recipients prefer. This effect emerges because givers are more prevention-focused (less promotion-focused) than recipients and wish to avoid offending recipients by violating a corresponding social norm that our results suggest is of less concern to those receiving their gift. We find evidence for this two-stage process through both mediation and moderation. This research adds to the gift giving literature by examining a new type of gifting decision, documenting a novel giver-recipient preference asymmetry, and shedding light on the roles that social norms, regulatory focus, and offensiveness play in gift giving.
More than 50 million consumers participate in online group buying, hence its importance to retailers cannot be ignored. Four studies are conducted to determine (a) whether customers' preferences to participate in group buying relative to buying alone are more in the case of experiential (vs. material) purchases; (b) underlying psychological mechanisms affecting an individual's willingness to invite additional buyers; and (c) the moderating role of analytic versus holistic thinking orientation within the mediational framework. Consistent with expectations, preferences to invite additional buyers to receive a further discount (vs. buying alone and taking the deal-of-the-day) were greater for experiential purchases than material purchases. Three psychological motivators, namely social relatedness, conversational value, and anticipatory enjoyment, act as parallel mediators. Finally, moderated-mediation analysis shows holistic thinking accentuates the mediational pathway of anticipatory enjoyment but not for social relatedness, whereas analytical thinking accentuates the mediational pathway of conversational value. Of practical relevance to those designing group buying websites is that offering an additional discount to buyers if they are willing to expend the effort to form a larger group not only reduced the number of individuals indicating that they would not make a purchase at all, but about a quarter of respondents indicated that they would endeavor to find additional buyers. In addition, there is a clear preference for experiential goods; and for material goods, the findings suggest drawing attention to the experiences that material goods offer.
We explore the psychology involved with giving and receiving gift cards by studying givers' and recipients' preferences for digital versus physical gift cards. Across five studies, we demonstrate that givers are less likely to choose digital (vs. physical) gift cards than recipients are to prefer to receive them. The data suggest that this asymmetry occurs, in part, because givers overestimate the extent to which recipients see digital (vs. physical) gift cards as violating the social norms of gift‐giving. Indeed, givers' aversion to digital gift cards attenuates when they are less likely to perceive digital (vs. physical) gift cards as violating gift‐giving norms and when they are less attentive to such norms. This research adds to the gift‐giving literature by offering an initial foray into the tradeoff between digital and physical gifts, demonstrating a new instance in which givers' and recipients' preferences diverge, and documenting an underlying cause and boundary conditions of this asymmetry.
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