Two-Faced Gifts—Power’s Impact on Deceptive Status-Gifting

Abstract

Previous gifting research has studied the interplay of consumers’ psychological state of power with their propensity to give status enhancing gifts. Yet, we are not aware of any systematic empirical work examining power’s impact on givers’ preference for deceptive status gifting. Our current work proposes that, despite possessing a desire to acquire status via gifting, low-power (vs. high-power) givers are more likely to refrain from deceptive status-gifting. Using four experiments, we demonstrate that, despite knowing that the gifts are counterfeits of luxury brands, consumers possess an inherent proclivity to gift them deceptively in order to enhance their status. Specifically, owing to their agentic orientation, as compared to low-power, high-power givers are more likely to prefer them over non-status gifts because it is an economical avenue for status enhancement. Moreover, power’s impact on preference for deceptive status-gifting is impacted by (a) the recipient’s acceptance of counterfeit brands, and (b) whether they are buying for others versus themselves. Lastly, there is an inherent asymmetry in the recipients’ expectation as they expect high-power givers to give expensive status-gifts whereas low-power givers give counterfeits.