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The purpose of this paper is to provide information on handling gifts‐in‐kind in Croatian public and academic libraries. It also recommends what should be done to improve practice with gifts for collections.

The paper is based on the author's research conducted using an anonymous online questionnaire that was sent to Croatian public libraries (n=139) and academic libraries (n=73) in May 2011. After a two‐week period, a total of 84 responses was received (40 public libraries and 44 academic libraries). In statistical analysis, some variables are tested by χ²‐test to show whether differences between public and academic libraries are statistically significant.

The majority of Croatian libraries do not have gift policy statements. Gifts do have a significant part in collection building, especially in Croatian academic libraries, but are not always handled in the right way (i.e. according to IFLA's guidelines). This paper shows the quantity of gifts in the libraries, librarians' reasons for not accepting some gifts, librarians' methods in dealing with gifts, and their way of communicating with donors or potential donors.

This paper gives results of the first complete study of gift policies in Croatian public and academic libraries. In conclusion, a need for a written gift policy in Croatian libraries is emphasized and some recommendations are given.

Businesses are spending billions of dollars on recognition rewards with the intent of boosting employee engagement, job satisfaction, and ultimately, their bottom line. However, employee engagement is at an all-time low. The purpose of this study was designed to take a step back to understand if there are demographic differences that influence personal preferences for tangible gifts as their preferred language of appreciation and of those who prefer to receive gifts, what types of gifts are most valued.

This study compared the demographics of those who selected tangible gifts as their primary (N  =  8,811), secondary (N = 14,827) or least valued (N  = 108,586) language of appreciation (motivating by appreciation inventory, White, 2011). From those with tangible gifts as their primary language of appreciation, 500 were randomly selected to code their open-ended suggestions for a preferred gift.

There are no important factors across the demographics of gender, age or work setting that influence whether individuals are more or less likely to choose tangible gifts as their primary, secondary or least valued language of appreciation. Respondents identified gift cards, additional paid time off and gifts related to desired personal experiences as their top gift choices.

When giving gifts to colleagues, discovering individuals’ personal preferences (favorite store, restaurant, ticketed event, food, drink and lunch option) is more likely to result in a gift that “hits the mark” in showing appreciation to the recipient.

When does a business gift become a bribe? Although there is a world of difference between a million or two from Lockheeds and a ballpoint from a local trader, the principles raised are worrying British business men, says Alec Snobel in this special report.

Everyone knows an outright gift when they see it: a one‐time gift of cash, or a pledge, a permanent gift of manuscripts, or a gift of appreciated stock which is sold by the charity for cash proceeds; even the donation of a single book is an “outright” gift to the library. A planned gift is as much a process as it is a charitable transaction. While a full discussion of the range of planned giving is beyond the scope of this article, a short definition will suffice: a planned gift is one that conforms to goals of the donor’s formal plan regarding their finances, retirement, or estate.

To define the elements of a gift books policy.

Research based on a review of library gift policies.

Provides libraries with general guidelines as to what should be included in a gift book policy.

Provides assistance to libraries to find a way to explain to prospective donors how the library handles donations and gifts.

The gift-giving literature has documented several cases in which givers and recipients do not see eye-to-eye in gift-giving decisions. To help integrate this considerable segment of the gifting literature, this paper aims to develop a social norms-based framework for understanding and predicting giver-recipient asymmetries in gift selection.

Five experimental studies test the hypotheses. Participants in these studies evaluate gifts used in previous research, choose between gifts as either gift-givers or gift-recipients, and/or indicate their level of discomfort with choosing different kinds of gifts. The gifts vary in ways that allow the authors to test the social norms-based framework.

Gift-giving asymmetries tend to occur when one of the gifts under consideration is less descriptively, but not less injunctively, normative than the other. This theme holds for both asymmetries recorded in the gift-giving literature and novel ones. Indeed, the authors document new asymmetries in cases where the framework would expect asymmetries to occur and, providing critical support for the framework, the absence of asymmetries in cases where the framework would not expect asymmetries to emerge. Moreover, the authors explain these asymmetries, and lack thereof, using a mechanism that is novel to the literature on gift-giving mismatches: feelings of discomfort.

This research has multiple theoretical implications for the literatures studying gift-giving and social norms. A limitation of this work is that it left some (secondary) predictions of its model untested. Future research could test some of these predictions.

Billions of dollars are spent on gifts each year, making gift-giving a research topic of great practical importance. In addition, the research offers suggestions to consumers giving gifts, consumers receiving gifts, as well as marketers.

The research is original in that it creates a novel framework that predicts both the presence and absence of gift-giving asymmetries, introduces a psychological mechanism to the literature on giver-recipient gift choice asymmetries, and unifies many of the mismatches previously documented in this literature.

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether providing shoppers with a gift upon entering a store would result in an increase in sales. An experiment was conducted in a pharmacy and a total of 200 subjects were used. The results showed that shoppers given a key chain and thanked for patronizing the store spent significantly more than a control group of shoppers who were not given any gift upon entry ($10.76 vs. $9.21). The results of this study are explained by reference to the literature on reciprocity and gift‐giving.

As librarians increasingly concentrate on planned collection development, gift material may distract from specific selection goals. Marginal gifts — donated materials that are outside a library's stated collecting policies — should be evaluated carefully before being added to the collection. Gift books may duplicate material already in the collection or may be entirely outside the subject scope of the library. Gifts are never truly free; they cost the library time and money to process and may also create problems later if they must be discarded. It is the librarian's professional responsibility to evaluate them in terms of collection goals and not simply allow the human side of graceful acceptance to prevail.

The purpose of this paper is to understand what Christmas gifts mean to children by examining the features and styles of the letters that children write to Santa Claus.

Contents and style of 314 authentic letters sent by UK children to Santa Claus were analyzed using an underlying interpretive consumer research approach.

Letters to Santa contain expressions of needs, wants, desires, hopes and dreams related to Christmas. The majority of letters were identified as expressions of wants and desires, while only a few letters contained features of needs or dreaming. This implies that for children Christmas seems to be a rather unspiritual festival concerning having things rather than dreams coming true.

The generalization of findings is limited to Western welfare societies. Letters are not originally written for research purposes, and therefore lack background information about the writers and their writing situations.

Analysis of letters to Santa offers an opportunity to identify the spirit of postmodern consumption with its contradictory aspects, and understand children as consumers. It is essential to recognize and understand the nature of the desires of today's children as they are an influential set of consumers.

The paper offers insights about the contemporary Christmas gift giving from the point of view of children. Contrary to previous studies, the central focus of the analysis is on gift request styles and letters as meaningful entities, not just on product categories or brands as such.