Abstract: A gift exchange platform assigns gifts to individuals in a network of businesses. Each of the businesses offers a set of gifts available for assigning by other businesses or individuals. The gift assignment system receives the set of offered gifts and gift transaction data describing the gifts in a time interval. A fairness score for each business is calculated based on the comparison of the inbound and outbound scores of the business reflecting the value provided by the business and received by the business of gifts. A request is received from a business, individual or an automated gift system to assign a gift to an individual. A gift and a gift offering business are assigned to an individual based on the fairness score of the assigned business. The gift assignment further accounts for an expected value of an individual to the business on redemption of the gift by the individual.