People who assembled an IKEA box bid $0.78 for it, against $0.48 from people handed the same box ready-made. Psychologists call it the IKEA effect.
People value things more when they build them themselves. In a study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, people who assembled a plain IKEA storage box bid $0.78 for it. People handed the identical box, already built, bid $0.48. That is about 63% more for the same box (our math).
The researchers, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely, named it the IKEA effect.
The box experiment
In the first experiment, 52 participants at a US university were split at random. "Builders" got a flat-packed black IKEA Kassett storage box and its instructions. "Non-builders" got the same box, fully assembled, and could inspect it.
Then everyone bid on the box, using a method that makes people state what they would really pay: bid at or above a randomly drawn price and you buy the box at that price.
- Builders bid $0.78 on average.
- Non-builders bid $0.48.
- Builders also liked the box more: 3.81 out of 7, against 2.50.
The origami twist
The second experiment asked a bigger question: how much do people overvalue their own work? Some of 106 participants folded an origami frog or crane, then bid on keeping it.
- Builders bid $0.23 on their own origami.
- Strangers bid $0.05 on those same creations. The paper says they saw them as "nearly worthless crumpled paper."
- Another group bid $0.27 on origami folded by experienced folders.
So novices valued their own creations almost as highly as others valued an expert's. The paper found no significant difference between those two bids.
You have to finish
In a later experiment, 39 participants worked on the same IKEA box. Some built it all the way. Others were stopped before the last two steps.
- People who finished bid $1.46.
- People stopped short bid $0.59.
The boost held even for people who said they were not "do-it-yourself" types. In a separate experiment with Lego sets, people who built a set and then took it apart no longer valued it significantly more.
It shows up in kids too
Later research led by L. E. Marsh and colleagues found the bias emerging around age 5. A 2022 study of 128 children aged 5 and 6 in the UK and India found that children in both countries valued a toy they had assembled over an identical copy.
The limits
- The samples were small and drawn from universities: 52, 106 and 39 people in the experiments above.
- The dollar amounts are small, because the items were cheap. The finding is about the gap between bids, not about what furniture is worth.
- Figures here come from the Harvard Business School working paper version of the study.
Sources
- Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., and Ariely, D. (2012). The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 453 to 460. DOI record
- Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., and Ariely, D. The "IKEA Effect": When Labor Leads to Love. Harvard Business School Working Paper 11-091. Full text, hbs.edu
- Marsh, L. E., Kanngiesser, P., and Hood, B. (2018). When and how does labour lead to love? The ontogeny and mechanisms of the IKEA effect. Cognition. DOI record
- Marsh, L. E., Gil, J., and Kanngiesser, P. (2022). The influence of collaboration and culture on the IKEA effect. Developmental Psychology. DOI record
