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Sharing is a fundamental consumer behavior that we have either tended to overlook or to confuse with commodity exchange and gift giving. Sharing is a distinct, ancient, and increasingly vital consumer research topic that bears on a broad array of consumption issues ranging from sharing household resources versus atomized family possessions to file sharing versus intellectual property rights. This theoretical review distinguishes between sharing in and sharing out, and suggests that sharing in dissolves interpersonal boundaries posed by materialism and possession attachment through expanding the aggregate extended self. However, such sharing is challenged by growing market commoditization. Implications for consumer theory and research are considered.

What determines reciprocity in employment relations? We conducted a controlled field experiment to measure the extent to which monetary and nonmonetary gifts affect workers' performance. We find that nonmonetary gifts have a much stronger impact than monetary gifts of equivalent value. We also observe that when workers are offered the choice, they prefer receiving money, but reciprocate as if they received a nonmonetary gift. This result is consistent with the common saying, “it's the thought that counts.” We underline this point by showing that monetary gifts can effectively trigger reciprocity if the employer invests more time and effort into the gift's presentation.

Most informal finance comes from family and friends. Existing informal finance theories cannot match two characteristics of family finance: family investors may accept belowmarket or even negative returns, yet borrowers often prefer formal finance. We argue that social preferences make family finance cheap but create shadow costs that nonetheless discourage its use: Committing family funds to risky investment displaces intrafamily insurance and undermines limited liability. The same characteristics that sustain familial insurance thus render family finance a poor source of risk capital. Even when overcoming capital constraints requires social ties, intermediation and semiformalization may therefore be crucial for promoting risk taking.

Laboratory experiments are a widely used methodology for advancing causal knowledge in the physical and life sciences. With the exception of psychology, the adoption of laboratory experiments has been much slower in the social sciences, although during the past two decades the use of lab experiments has accelerated. Nonetheless, there remains considerable resistance among social scientists who argue that lab experiments lack \"realism\" and generalizability. In this article, we discuss the advantages and limitations of laboratory social science experiments by comparing them to research based on nonexperímental data and to field experiments. We argue that many recent objections against lab experiments are misguided and that even more lab experiments should be conducted.

This article looks at the trade-offs that gift givers and gift receivers make between desirability and feasibility using construal level theory as a framework. Focusing on the asymmetric distance from a gift that exists within giver-receiver dyads, the authors propose that, unlike receivers, givers construe gifts abstractly and therefore weight desirability attributes more than feasibility attributes. Support for this proposition emerges in studies examining giver and receiver mind-sets, as well as giver and receiver evaluations of gifts. Furthermore, givers do not choose gifts that maximize receiver happiness or other relationship goals even though givers believe they are doing so. Finally, the authors demonstrate that while givers are sensitive to their distance from the receiver, receivers are not sensitive to this distance.

A critical question facing experimental economists is whether behavior inside the laboratory is a good indicator of behavior outside the laboratory. To address that question, we build a model in which the choices that individuals make depend not just on financial implications, but also on the nature and extent of scrutiny by others, the particular context in which a decision is embedded, and the manner in which participants and tasks are selected. We present empirical evidence demonstrating the importance of these various factors. To the extent that lab and naturally occurring environments systematically differ on any of these dimensions, the results obtained inside and outside the lab need not correspond. Focusing on experiments designed to measure social preferences, we discuss the extent to which the existing laboratory results generalize to naturally-occurring markets. We summarize cases where the lab may understate the importance of social preferences as well as instances in which the lab might exaggerate their importance. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of interpreting laboratory and field data through the lens of theory.

This article develops a model of how the structure of exchange can manage such disreputable exchanges as the commensuration of sacred for profane. Whereas existing research discusses the rhetorical reframing of exchange, I highlight structures that obfuscate whether an exchange is occurring and thereby mitigate exchange taboos. I identify three such exchange structures: bundling, brokerage, and gift exchange. Bundling uses crosssubsidization across multiple innocuous exchanges to synthesize a taboo exchange.Brokerage finds a third party to accept responsibility for exchange. Gift exchange delays reciprocity and reframes exchanges as expressions of friendship. All three strategies have alternative meanings and so provide plausible deniability to taboo commensuration. The article concludes by arguing that these sorts of exchange structures represent a synthesis of \"nothing but\" reductionism and \"hostile worlds\" moralism, rather than an alternative to them as Viviana Zelizer suggests.

Scholars have converged on a theory that ritual involves poetically dense figuration of macrocosmic order in microcosmic action. I illustrate this by surveying work on how ritual and oratory involve coordination of action across multiple semiotic media. I review at greater length the \"poetic density\" theory's interest in how ritual and oratory causally shape people's worlds, and the theory's interest in the edginess of ritual as a site of articulation between actors with disparate political positionalities. Much scholarship now examines norms of the pragmatics of sign use (not just signification's semantics, so to speak) as being of a piece with the poetic, figurational organization of ritual and oratorical processes. This turn of attention is important for understanding what it means that ritual seems to be action about the organization of action itself. A final element in ritual and oratory's poetic density surveyed here is their nesting in culturally variable ideologies of ritual and oratorical genres themselves.

Desire for social esteem is a source of prosocial behavior. We develop a model in which actors' utility of esteem depends on the audience. In a principal-agent setting, we show that the model can account for motivational crowding out. Control systems and pecuniary incentives erode morale by signaling to the agent that the principal is not worth impressing. The model also offers an explanation for why agents are motivated by unconditionally high pay and by mission-oriented principals.

Recent discoveries in behavioral economics have led scholars to question the underpinnings of neoclassical economics. We use insights gained from one of the most influential lines of behavioral research-gift exchange-in an attempt to maximize worker effort in two quite distinct tasks: data entry for a university library and door-to-door fundraising for a research center. In support of the received literature, our field evidence suggests that worker effort in the first few hours on the job is considerably higher in the \"gift\" treatment than in the \"nongift\" treatment. After the initial few hours, however, no difference in outcomes is observed, and overall the gift treatment yielded inferior aggregate outcomes for the employer: with the same budget we would have logged more data for our library and raised more money for our research center by using the market-clearing wage rather than by trying to induce greater effort with a gift of higher wages.