By Jason Hreha

Glossary

IKEA effect

Reviewed by Jason Hreha

Updated Published 3 min read

What is the IKEA effect?

The IKEA effect is the tendency for people to place disproportionately high value on products they partially created. A box you assembled yourself can feel worth more than the same box assembled by someone else. The work becomes part of how you value the result.

How it works

The leading explanations are that making something ties it to a person’s sense of self and gives them a feeling of ownership. The name comes from a 2012 paper by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely, whose participants assembled IKEA storage boxes. It was designed to test whether people value things they build more than identical things built by someone else. Researchers in other labs have since tested the idea with different objects, people, and measures.

Lukasz Walasek, Tim Rakow, and William Matthews ran three experiments with 476 university volunteers, who built science kits, LEGO models, or a wooden butterfly. People who built a kit they owned asked for more money to sell it than owners of a ready-made kit. That difference was significant in two of the three experiments. Building did little for people who were bidding to buy the same kit instead. The researchers’ explanation is that building ties an object to a person’s sense of self, mainly when the builder gets to keep it.

Children show the effect too. Lauren Marsh and colleagues found that it emerges at about age 5. In one of their studies, with 5- and 6-year-olds, the amount of effort did not change the effect. Another found that ownership alone did not explain it. A later study of 128 British and Indian children found that children in both countries valued a toy they had assembled over an identical copy, whether they built it alone or with a partner.

A conceptual replication by Marko Sarstedt, Doreen Neubert, and Kati Barth, using objects made from loom bands, also found that people valued what they made more and felt more ownership of it. The original 2012 paper had reported that the advantage disappeared when people failed to finish or destroyed what they built. In the replication’s comparison of finished and unfinished objects, the difference was not statistically significant, although dismantling an object went with lower valuation. That boundary is therefore not settled.

A 2026 meta-analysis of IKEA-effect research also found a moderate average effect. It very likely pools the original 2012 experiments with later work, so it is not fully independent of them.

Applied example

A meal-kit company could apply the idea by giving customers a manageable cooking task that ends with a meal they feel proud to have made. That is a hypothesis to test, not a guarantee that people will prefer the meal to one from a restaurant.

One study is a useful caution. Researchers asked 86 children aged 4 to 6 to build a peacock out of vegetables. The comparison group built one from non-food objects, with the vegetables in view. The builders did not like or eat the vegetables significantly more.

The authors note that the comparison children’s exposure to the vegetables may explain this null result. One reading is that making something raises the value of the thing made, not necessarily liking for its ingredients; the study did not test that directly.

Why it matters

For product design, employee participation and education, the useful idea is to let people make something they can finish and keep. Do not turn it into “more work is always better”: in one study of 5- and 6-year-olds, the amount of effort did not change the effect. Whether an unfinished or frustrating task produces the same result is not settled, so test it before relying on it. Valuing an object more also does not automatically mean someone will stay in a job or keep buying a product.

Sources and further reading