Business Gifts − a Bibliographic Analysis

Gift-giving has always been an essential part used to build rapport, negotiate deals, and create trust in all business interactions. This paper analyzes the implications of corporate gift-giving on culture, law, and ethics. The analysis also used bibliometric methods through Web of Science and VOSviewer on the existing literature on business gifting to establish patterns of key research focus areas, subject aspects and their spatial distribution. The analysis looks into the purposes that business gifts serve in corporate diplomacy in relation to economic activity and morality and how multinational companies deal with the compliance issues arising from international regulations on business gifting using the insights. Evidence shows a steady interest by scholars with a distribution of 30–40 papers per year across various journals and academic institutions at any point in time. The prominent scholars from the United States, United Kingdom, China, Australia emerged as the most prolific authors representing active and cross disciplinary participation in this topic.