The Gift Economy. In one experiment, three types of invitations to use a flower delivery service were offered: Group 1 users were offered $10 to invite friends to use the service; Group 2 users were offered the chance to give a $10 discount to someone they invited, but they received no money themselves; and Group 3 users and invitees were each offered $5. Which group of users do you think sent their friends more invitations? The answer from recent research (Aral, 2013) is that Groups 2 and 3 generated more sends than did Group 1. The researcher notes that this conforms to the notion of a gift economy, where being generous increases ones status. Have you seen examples of this gift economy in your own social media experiences?