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Consumer researchers have recently shed light on multiple instances in which gift-givers' decisions do not align with gift-recipients' preferences (Galak, Givi, and Williams 2016), with much of this research focusing on givers' and recipients' preferences concerning types of products. In other words, the decision regarding what to give has received plenty of attention from gift-giving scholars. However, an important aspect of gift-giving that has not received much attention is the decision concerning how to give. In the present work, we shed light on this important facet of gift-giving by exploring givers' and recipients' preferences concerning the messaging aspect of how to give. Specifically, we study the two parties' preferences regarding the practice of earmarking cash gifts.
We define "earmarking" as a giver accompanying a cash gift with a suggestion that the money be used to purchase a particular product. The practice of earmarking cash gifts seems to be rather prevalent: When we asked 50 MTurk participants whether they had ever given or received an earmarked cash gift, we found that 70% of them had. Moreover, the vast literature on mental accounting (e.g., Heath and Soil 1996) suggests that earmarking money, more generally, is quite common among consumers. Despite the pervasiveness of earmarking, the gift-giving literature has not yet explored whether givers' and recipients' preferences for earmarking cash gifts align or diverge, nor has it explored the psychology underlying how the two parties construe earmarked cash gifts. In the present work, we explore both facets, thereby addressing these important voids.
We posit that givers are less likely to earmark cash gifts than recipients prefer because the two parties hold different views concerning the thoughtfulness of earmarking cash gifts: When a giver earmarks a cash gift, this...