Way back in 1993 Joel Waldfogel argued that from a tenth to a third of annual christmas presents is nothing much, but a deadweight loss. We usually regard Christmas to be a good thing, economically - stimulated consumption, stimulated economic growth. Yet some people are just bad at picking the right gift. Hence the deadweight loss (Christmas mathematics and the rest of the paper here - http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/WaldfogelDeadweightLossXmas.pdf). Waldfogel likes curious topics. This is him on RePEc - http://ideas.repec.org/e/pwa46.html
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