The recent Yahoo t-shirt debacle highlights an issue with gift economies. They depend on reciprocity, which generates feelings of entitlement almost by construction. This is an important example, because massive open source repositories like GitHub, and open exchanges like StackOverflow have made gift markets easier to do at scale and distance. More interestingly, gift economies seem reinforced not by the people doing the giving, but by the public at large. If a giver doesn’t feel adequately reciprocated, often they simply stop giving.

Imagine Alice spends 8 hours fixing Bob’s computer, and Bob makes her an absolutely fantastic dinner to thank her. But when Charlie fixes Dino’s computer, Dino says “thanks dude, high five!” Charlie thinks “Dino might not value my work very much.” Of course Dino was under no legal requirement, but the obligation was still oddly set by the way Alice/Bob behaved in the gift economy.

To many it “feels wrong” even if they are mere observers. Dino might say “so entitled!” and that’s true - that’s the whole way that gift economies seem to work, by creating an expectation of reciprocity. When that expectation - however logical or justified - is not met, people get upset. Oddly, it is very difficult to avoid an entrenched gift economy without incurring public shame. (insert speculations on evolutionary psych).