From the lesswrong article: >If you have a fixed amount of money to spend—and your goal is to display your friendship, rather than to actually help the recipie

From the lesswrong article: >If you have a fixed amount of money to spend—and your goal is to display your friendship, rather than to actually help the recipient—you’ll be better off deliberately not shopping for value. I actually already do this to help the recipient. If you're buying according to someones interests, there's a good chance they already have an equivalent or better of the value option you're considering. Or if they don't, it's because they considered it already and decided they don't want it. When gift buying I use these as guidelines: related to their interests, expensive for its class, consumable, I can acquire it and they can't.