IKEA effect

The IKEA effect is the extra value we give to things we have made or assembled ourselves. A wobbly bookshelf you built, a sweater you knitted with a dropped stitch, a dresser you refinished on the balcony all feel worth more to you than the same objects bought finished, and often more than anyone else would pay for them. The effort becomes part of the object. That pride is one of the pleasures of making things, and it can also become a reason to buy more.

Boxes, frogs and cranes

In a paper published in 2012, the researchers Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely gave the effect its name, in honor of the furniture company whose products usually arrive with some assembly required. They set out to measure it in a series of experiments in which people built simple things and then bid on them with their own money.

In the first, 52 people at a university in the southeastern United States were paid $5 to take part. Some were given a plain black IKEA storage box, flat-packed, with the usual instructions, and asked to assemble it. Others were handed the same box already built and invited to look it over. Everyone then bid for the box under a procedure that rewards people for stating what they would truly pay. The builders bid $0.78 on average and the others $0.48, about 63 percent more for the same box. The builders also liked their boxes more.

The second experiment tested how far the effect stretches. A group of 106 people folded origami frogs or cranes and bid on their own work. Then other people, who did not know who had made what, bid on the same creations, and a third group bid on frogs and cranes folded by experts. The makers bid $0.23 on average for their own origami. The others bid $0.05 for those same pieces, and $0.27 for the experts’ work. In other words, the amateurs valued their own creases at nearly five times what strangers would pay and close to what others offered for skilled work.

Two more studies looked at what makes the effect work. In one, people who built a set of building blocks and then had to take it apart lost the extra value they had placed on it. In another, with 39 participants, people who were asked to stop the box assembly two steps from the end bid $0.59, against $1.46 from those who finished. Effort alone was not enough. The love came from finishing.

Why our own work feels valuable

The authors’ explanation centers on effort and competence. Putting work into something makes us want the work to have been worthwhile, and a finished object is proof that we are capable. The endowment effect adds to it: a thing you made is very clearly yours. Customizing works in a similar way, because the result reflects your choices, but the storage box shows that plain labor is enough, even on a product with nothing to customize.

How pride starts a chain

Picture a $60 thrift-store dresser. You spend a weekend sanding, priming and painting it, and when it is done it is the piece you are proudest of in the apartment. Suddenly its plastic knobs are unworthy of it, so $45 of brass pulls go on. The lamp beside it looks cheap, so a $120 lamp replaces it, and the bare wall above needs a $90 mirror. The project went so well that the next one deserves proper tools, starting with a $200 orbital sander. A $60 find has led to $455 of follow-on spending, all of it set off by pride in a piece you made yourself.

How sellers put you to work

• Assembly as a feature. Kits, flat-pack furniture and build-it-yourself workshops shift labor to the customer and can still charge a premium. The paper’s authors point to teddy-bear workshops and farm stays where guests pay to harvest their own food.
• Meal kits and recipes. Adding a step or two of real cooking makes the meal feel like yours.
• Configurators. Choosing colors, parts and engravings online puts your effort into a product before you buy it.
• Setup and onboarding. Profiles to fill in, playlists to build and settings to tune make an app or a device harder to leave.

How to price your pride

1. Count your hours up front. Before starting a project, estimate the time it will take and what the finished thing would cost to buy. If the hours are the point, enjoy them; if the money is the point, check the math.
2. Get a stranger’s price. Before you keep, sell or display something you made as if it were precious, look up what similar things sell for. The origami gap is a reminder of how far apart those numbers can be.
3. Let the glow pass. The urge to buy things that live up to your project is strongest right after you finish. Wait at least a week, or use the 30-day rule, before buying anything to go with it.
4. Use what you made. Pride is best spent on use. A refinished dresser that holds your clothes for ten years is a bargain, and our cost per wear calculator shows how the per-use cost of a well-made thing falls.

Where it meets the Diderot effect

The Diderot effect begins when one possession outclasses the things around it. The IKEA effect makes that possession more likely to be something you made, because labor inflates its value in your own eyes. A newly refinished dresser can do to a bedroom what Diderot’s scarlet robe did to his study, setting a standard that everything nearby now fails. Our ten Diderot effect examples show how far one standard-setting piece can pull a room or a hobby, and the sunk cost fallacy keeps such projects going once the spending is under way.