We’ve written about gifts before.

1. We’ve written posts recommending Christmas gifts (here and here and here and here).
2. I wrote that gifts might be good for the macroeconomy.
3. Joy Wrote about birthday presents at school parties.
4. James wrote about considering supply chain status when ordering a gift.

Michael Maynard and I wrote about giving a good gift. A good gift is one in which the giver has an information advantage. Gifting an object or a service can provide a consumption bundle to the recipient that they didn’t know was even possible or that they didn’t know that they would prefer. They would have chosen the items themselves, if only they had known about them. Giving a gift card can be similar if the recipient did not know about the vendor previously. Cash is a good gift when the giver does not have an information advantage over the recipient.

In our previous post, we showed diagrammatically that ‘better off’ was indicated by the higher utility. But this spurs an important question:

Can good gifts cost the giver zero dollars?

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