Is there a 'fairer' alternative/variant of the White Elephant Gift Exchange?

External question — Economics Stack Exchange Author: dwjohnston Original post: https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/40259 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. The White Elephant Gift Exchange is a gift exchanging game that typically has the following rules: Each participant enters one anonymous (ie. wrapped) gift to the pile. There may be rules on what the gift may be, eg minimum and/or maximum price. In my family we have a 'must be second hand, hand made, or locally made' rule. A participant is chosen at random, and they can either: Choose a present from the pile, and unwrap it. 'Steal' an existing gift from another person already holding an unwrapped gift. If gift is stolen, then it is now the person who was stolen from's turn. They can in turn steal from someone, or take from the pile. If a gift is taken from the pile, then a participant who doesn't already have a gift is drawn randomly, and they can steal or take from the pile. There are usually restrictions on stealing. Typically: You can't steal a gift back from the person who just stole from you. A gift can only be stolen a limited number of times, typically three. After that, it is 'locked' and belongs to the person holding it. Additionally, we've found it helpful to add the rule that: Partners/spouses can't steal from each other. This prevents a circumvention of the 'You can't steal from the person who stole from you' rule. Now thing is, in these kinds of exchanges, even with value limits, some people are going to give good, sought after gifts, and some people are going to give crappy gifts. The gift exchange provides some amount of mechanism for not just being assigned a random crappy gift, however, it is largely luck. The optimal strategy for maximising gift value tends to be: If you can, never take from the pile. This is because it's almost entirely luck based. Instead, you should aim to steal the highest value possible gift currently unwrapped, even if it's not something you want . That is - you're actively measuring how in demand a gift is according to other participants. That way, your gift is likely to be stolen from you, and you get to make a second choice. If there is a gift that you want, you shouldn't be second stealer of it. This is because if someone steals it from you, then it is locked. So typically, the way the game will typically play out, is that there will be some gifts that obviously sought after, and others that are clearly white elephants. The 'fair' system of distribution would have people who had contributed these high value gifts, also having a greater chance of receiving one of these high value gifts. No doubt, some kind of ranking system and algorithm could be devised, however in the context of a party game, the rules need to be simple. Are there any such variants on the game, or similar game that allows for this fairer distribution?