Experiment 12 · Famous experiments
The flat-pack box that was worth more because you built it
People valued simple things they had assembled themselves more highly than identical ones built by someone else, as long as they finished the job.
- Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely
- Harvard Business School, Boston, United States
- 2012
- 3 min read
On this page
Before you readWhat would you do?
Your team spent six months building a spreadsheet tool for scheduling staff. A ready-made app now does the same job with fewer errors in a trial. The team wants to keep their tool. What is the best way to decide?
Pick an answer now. The file tells you whether you were right.
01The file in one minute
1Built it, valued it
People who assembled an IKEA box would pay more for it than others would for the same ready-built box.
2Amateur origami
People valued their own paper animals close to experts' work, while others saw little value in them.
3Finishing matters
When the job was left unfinished or undone, the extra value mostly disappeared.
4The trap at work
Effort is not evidence of quality. Let someone who did not build it judge it.
02Timeline
2011
Norton, Mochon and Ariely circulate their studies as a Harvard Business School working paper.
2012
The studies are published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology under the name IKEA effect.
Since 2012
The idea is widely used in product design and in thinking about sunk costs.
03The experiment
In a set of studies published in 2012, the researchers Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely asked some volunteers to assemble a plain IKEA storage box. Others were given the same box already built. Then everyone was asked how much they would pay for it.
The builders were willing to pay noticeably more for their box than the others were for an identical one, and they liked it more. In another study, people folded origami frogs and cranes. They valued their own clumsy paper animals at close to what they valued pieces made by experts, while other people saw them as nearly worthless.
The effect had limits. When people built something and then had to take it apart, or when they did not finish, the extra value mostly disappeared. The researchers named it the IKEA effect.
04What it showed
Effort feels like investment, and people like to think their effort was worth it. Finishing seems to matter because a completed product proves the effort paid off. The researchers suggested this can also be a good thing, since it helps explain why people enjoy cooking, gardening and DIY.
It becomes a trap at work. A team that spent months building an internal tool may rate it higher than a better product it could buy. A person who wrote a long, careful prompt may defend the answer it produced more than the answer deserves. Your own effort is not evidence of quality.
The idea behind this caseLesson: Review AI like a manager →
05What it means when you use AI
- Before you compare your own work with an alternative, write down what good looks like, so the effort you put in does not set the bar.
- Ask someone who did not build it to judge it.
- When you have refined an AI answer for an hour, read it again as if a stranger had sent it to you.
- Use the effect on purpose: let customers or colleagues do a small, finishable part of a job when you want them to value it.
07 — Sources
- The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love · Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2012
- IKEA effect · Wikipedia · 2026