Happy Valentine’s Day: Economics and the nature of a gift

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone, from Gulnara and myself. To celebrate we’ve put up a video characterising two different ways of thinking about gift giving – specifically the conflict between telling someone what gift you want and the nature of a surprise gift.

People think and feel very differently about this, and fair enough we all have different preferences and have been raised in different gifting cultures (influencing the type of signal a gift is).

However, by thinking about why someone may feel differently about a gift allows us all to understand these different perspectives – as they say, economics is the path to tolerance, acceptance, and ultimately love.

We would love to hear how you think about both giving and receiving presents – what have we missed?