The IKEA effect is the tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on products they partially assembled or created themselves, compared to equivalent already-finished products. The effect was named and experimentally demonstrated in a 2011 study by the behavioral economists Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely, whose participants who built their own IKEA furniture, origami or Lego sets were willing to pay significantly more for their own creations than independent evaluators were willing to pay for the identical finished items. The researchers proposed that the effect arises from the sense of effort and personal investment involved in labor, provided the task is actually completed successfully, since effort that ends in failure did not produce the same inflated valuation.
Facts
Core ClaimLabor alone, even a plain assembly task with no creative input, is enough to make people overvalue what they built, an effect the researchers tied to effectance, the basic human need to feel competent and in control of outcomes in one's environment. 1 First Described Year Classification
Type of Phenomenon Sources
1. Wikipedia: IKEA effect
Wikimedia Foundationlead paragraph, definition
The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created.
lead section, defining sentence
The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created.
origin/history passage
Norton of Harvard Business School, Daniel Mochon of Yale, and Dan Ariely of Duke, who published the results of three studies in 2011.
lead section, phenomenon-kind classification
The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created.
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