The economic case for regifting

Despite its pleasures, gift giving can be problematic.

A recipient wants items A and B (say, a hat and gloves) yet receives items C and D (say, a scarf and mittens). Another recipient wants C and D, yet receives A and B. The___________ seems simple: The two recipients can simply pass along the gifts they received to each other.

The ___________ however, is more complex. People in a study published in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour, for instance, used such words as guilty, lazy, thoughtless and disrespectful in describing their___________ about regifting. Popular culture casts it as taboo, as well.

Getting stuck with gifts we do not want is no small problem. Consider that the National Retail Federation calculated that the average holiday-season___________in the U.S. last year spent more than $1,000 on gifts. In a survey across 14 countries in Europe, meanwhile, 1 in 7 said they were unhappy with what they received for Christmas, yet more than half simply kept the gifts.

Why can’t more gifts be passed along to people who ___________them?

Our research with Francis J. Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, suggests the shame associated with regifting is largely ___________. Indeed, our research consistently tells us that people overestimate the negative consequences.

We conducted a study in which we asked people to imagine themselves either as a ”giver,” who gives someone a gift card and later ___________it has been regifted; or as a “regifter,” one who receives the gift and gives it to someone else. The latter group saw more offense. Regifters tended to assume the original givers would be ___________ when they found out. The general ___________ of the original givers, however, was: It’s your gift, do what you want with it.”

Next, we tried to shed light on just how serious the perceived offense is. We asked two group —again givers and regifters—to____________ regifting a hypothetical (假设的)wristwatch with throwing it in the trash. For the original givers, regifting the watch was a much less offensive act than trashing it. The regifters, however, ____________ assumed that the givers would find both equally offensive.

Finally, given that the feared offense looks more imagined than real, we turned our attention to how people might be____________ to break this taboo.

For this part of our research, we invited to our lab at Stanford people who had recently received presents and divided the people into two groups. When we gave the first group an opportunity to____________that present, 9% did so.

When we gave the second group the same opportunity, we added that it was ‘“National Regifting Day,” a real____________that happens each year on the Thursday before Christmas. It wasn’t really National Regifting Day, but the group didn’t know that: 30% of them agreed to regift.

Everyone has received bad gifts in their lives, and we generally accept that we will receive more in the future. Yet for some reason, we believe that we give only good gifts.

Our research offers a simple solution to the problem of ____________ gifts. This holiday season, consider regifting, and encourage people who receive your gifts to do the same if what you give them isn’t quite what they hope for.