Do the answers to any of these questions change if the gift is offered before you purchase anything from the company, as opposed to after you are already a steady customer?
(A more detailed version of these types of scenarios can be found in [ Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins, 2000 ].)
Keep in mind that gifts accepted even after the purchase of something from a company might be a bribe directed at securing future sales from you or might be aimed at engineers at other companies. Although nothing was said about a gift up front, now that you have received one, the expectation of gifts might affect your future purchase decisions. Similarly, an employee of a company like yours might become aware of the gift that you received. He now realizes that if he orders parts from the same supplier that you did, he will receive a gift similar to yours. He will be tempted to order from this supplier even if there is a better supplier of that product on the market. These types of gifts tend to shut out smaller companies that can’t necessarily afford gifts and might also cause an increase in everyone’s costs, since if everyone now expects to receive gifts, the product cost must go up. Clearly, bribery is pernicious, and even the appearance of bribery should be avoided.