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It is proposed that when people give a gift they engage in 'love accounting',so that they will spend less on it if they include a written expression of love with it.This hypothesis was tested with college students (N = 308).It was found that participants who wrote a love message to accompany a Mother's Day gift budgeted less for the gift itself than control participants (Experiment 1),and this effect was replicated for a Christmas gift (Experiment 2).The amount of effort expended by the giver on preparing the love message did not account for the effect (Experiment 3).It is concluded that a gift and its accompanying love message are mentally computed as belonging to the same love account,implying that consumers’ excessive splurging on gifts might be controlled by writing a love message before gift shopping.