The Effect of Wrapping Neatness on Gift Attitudes

Not really sure why the first one is viewed as "less is better" at all. The design doesn't rule out the idea that someone would prefer a $150 coat to a $45 scarf. To me all it demonstrates is that generosity is at least partially anchored in the quality of a gift relative to the category it was selected in -- I'd rather a really nice scarf than a really crummy coat, even if coats cost more than scarfs. I can experiment this way on myself: if someone got me a gorgeous, $25 pocket square, I'd derive much more utility than if they got me a hideous $300 Men's Warehouse cotton-poly suit. And you could even read this a third way: some objects you want one of (I don't need a second microwave, for instance, even if it's better than the one I own) and some objects you want many of (I would be happy with any bottles of Scotch!)

The second study also lends itself to more rational / less "behavioural" explanations. First, it's possible there's diminishing marginal returns between 24 and 31 pieces to the point that f(31) ~= f(24) and f(31) - disposal_cost < f(24).

Second, perhaps utility for a dinner set depends on its quality as in the first study. I have a relatively diffuse prior about the quality of the dinner sets, but by learning that Option A has 9 broken pieces, I update my belief so that I now think Option A has 31 crummy pieces and Option B has 24 decent pieces. Maybe the brokenness of the 9 pieces is orthogonal to the quality of the various sets, but in general this would seem to be a good heuristic and a smart use of updating.

To take either of these things as a conclusion about expectation setting or less-is-more seems silly to me. More is more, but only in utility terms, not in raw input dollars.

Or a 10$ Exotic gummy.

From the lesswrong article:

>If you have a fixed amount of money to spend—and your goal is to display your friendship, rather than to actually help the recipient—you’ll be better off deliberately not shopping for value.

I actually already do this to help the recipient.

If you're buying according to someones interests, there's a good chance they already have an equivalent or better of the value option you're considering. Or if they don't, it's because they considered it already and decided they don't want it.

When gift buying I use these as guidelines: related to their interests, expensive for its class, consumable, I can acquire it and they can't.

I don't think it's fair to characterise this as some sort of 'trick'.

A high quality item, regardless of cost, is generally going to be far more useful and long-lasting, than a low quality item in a different category which costs more.

I would rather own, or buy myself, a $45 scarf than a $55 coat, assuming that the scarf is actually better in its' class and not just a scam (like some designer nonsense with a label on it).

I would think a stronger indictment of the external validity of the study is not the sample (I have no reason to believe people slightly older/younger are materially different than college students, and to the extent that wealth is a confounder I would expect the direction of confounding to attenuate the study as presented), but rather the design: the way people perceive "prizes" won from participating in a study is materially different than the way they appreciate gifts given to them by people they know and have a bond with.

There's also an internal validity argument to be made that the effect size is trivial in substantive terms. 7.06 versus 7.82 on a 9 point scale of satisfaction for a mug? Who gives a shit? I would interpret both 7.06 and 7.82 as "I like this gift, it is a good gift". And also, who cares about getting a mug? If a mug is anchored at a 7-7.8 for me, then every gift I actually get from loved ones is going to be about a 500 out of 9.

Study 3 is meant to deal with the social-emotional element of giving a gift, but that's the only study where people don't actually get a gift. They use MTurkers and ask them to imagine. I would completely ignore this part of the study.

The more interesting takeaway here is the 1.5 point spread in anticipation between neat and sloppily wrapped gifts in Study 2. That's a way bigger effect than I'd think.

Do you have a large-format printer, tend to give small gifts that can be wrapped with a single sheet of letter/a4 paper, or just use multiple pieces per gift? What paper do you use?