Gift giving is thought to be welfare decreasing. This claim rests on two key assumptions, namely, full information as to the whereabouts of all goods and the ability to reach the stores that contain desired goods costlessly. In this paper, we replace these two assumptions with the more realistic assumption of uncertainty about the location of goods. As a result, search costs ensue. In sharp con...

0003-3472 2012 The Association for the Study of A doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.03.007 Males of the spider Pisaura mirabilis offer prey items as nuptial gifts to females. While gift giving in this species has received attention in captivity, the ecological context of these gifts remains largely unknown. First, we examine the occurrence of gift carrying by males in nature. Field data reveal that gi...

Established in 1995, the UNU/Institute of Advanced studies (UNU/IAS) is an advanced research and education institution with a flexible and multi-thematic programme orientation concerned with the interactions of social and natural systems. For the initial years, the UNU/IAS programme is directed at sustainable development issues. To this end, the UNU/IAS is currently active in the following rele...

This paper presents statistics of a controlled laboratory gift-exchangegame experiment. These numbers can be used for assumptions about human behavior in analysis of noisy web data. The experiment was described in ‘The Impact of Social Comparisons on Reciprocity’ by Gächter et al. 2012. As already shown in relevant literature from experimental economics, human decisions deviate from rational pa...

This research investigated the relation between individual differences in inhibitory control and emotion regulation. Preschool children (N= 53) ages 4–6 (M= 5; 0) were assessed on brief batteries of inhibitory control of prepotent responses and emotion regulation. Individual differences in inhibitory control were significantly correlated with children’s ability to regulate their emotions. This ...

Multiple Choice Questions or MCQs are very important for e-learning. Many MCQ Tools allow us to generate MCQs very easily. However, in most of the cases they are not portable. That means MCQs generated for one system cannot be used for other unless a common format is used. So, collaboration and/or up gradation becomes a time consuming tedious task. In this paper, we will examine how a tool coul...

Why do people volunteer? What makes people give their time for others? Is volunteering really for those who are in need or volunteers themselves? While the idea of the gift and gift exchange is often used by practitioners of volunteering, it is also one of the research areas to which anthropology has largely contributed over decades. Gift exchange is a significant social phenomenon which reflec...

What are the characteristics of a good courtship gift? We address this question by modelling courtship as a sequential game. This is structured as follows: the male offers a gift to a female; after observing the gift, the female decides whether or not to accept it; she then chooses whether or not to mate with the male. In one version of the game, based on human courtship, the female is uncertai...

In vast markets of developing economies, especially in South Asia, both seasonal rural migrants and threatened urban workers constitute a bulk of the new class of working poor and are truly marginal in terms of their socio-economic status. We argue that gift-giving and gift exchanges in labour markets can perpetuate both rural and urban poverty among the working poor. In the context of working ...