If you're planning on buying your loved one a gift during the Christmas holiday, this may interest you.At Christmas and birthdays, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and parents give gifts to their college-aged loved ones. Joel Waldfogel, an economist at Yale University, surveyed several thousand college students after Christmas to find out the value of holiday gifts as perceived by the students. He found that technology and outerwear (coats and jackets) had a perceived value about equal to their actual cash value. By the time he got down to socks, underwear, and cosmetics, the students’ evaluation was only about 85 percent of the cash value of the gift.
Now knowing this information may prompt you to believe that substituting physical gifts with cash or gift certificates whose perceived value is known may be a wise decision. However, physical gifts show that the giver has gone to the trouble to try to find a gift that will please the recipient. Such an effort can be viewed as caring, whereas a gift of cash or a gift certificate may not send such a message.
