Looking for behavioral economics research about the redemption of gift cards
A classical economic explanation for the phenomenon you describe is that the gift giver does not know the receivers preferences well enough. Prominently, Joel Waldfogel makes this point in his fun paper "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas":


  I find that holiday gift giving destroys between one-third and one-tenth of the value of gifts.


This article pops up in the public domain every year around the holidays (example in the NYT) and its idea of course also applies to all other gift-giving-and-receiving situations.
Of course many people (including economists) disagree with that notion and you find quite a lot of comments and replies on that paper in the AER, just type the title of the paper into google.scholar.