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The IKEA Effect – Why managers fall in love with their own ideas

Tao3300 4y ago
> people tend to ascribe a higher valuation towards self-assembled products compared to objectively similar products which they did not assemble While I agree with the potential hazards of this kind of thinking, I'd be interested to see some positives in addition to just the "pitfalls". Better idea of valuation of labor in addition to materials? Reduction of waste? Some intangible "what we learned along the way" factor?
- zorpner 4y ago
  Offhand, an understanding of the assembly and internal mechanics of a product from having built it would make me feel like I would be be more likely to be able to fix it if required.
  - michaelchisari 4y ago
    Right and the opposite of "Not Invented Here" can be layers upon layers of magical abstraction that nobody understands.
- friendzis 4y ago
  From my own observations there two general reasons: * Assembly is seen as [near] zero value add step, therefore self assembling is seen as an easy opportunity for savings, especially when assembly is actually sold service. * People think that assembly is generally done by minimum wage employees coasting through the day and half assing tasks, therefore self assembly with a little bit of focus and dedication is seen to lead to higher than default assembly quality.
progre 4y ago
From "self assebled box" to "managers own idea", thats quite a jump. There are lots of reasons why people push their own solutions. To stake a claim of expertise in an area, the need to impress peers and reports, genuine ignorance of other solutions...
- gregmac 4y ago
  Agreed. The benefits of their idea working out are huge, but so is the personal negative impact of it failing -- even if the outcome for the company is better. A lot of people also find it really difficult to admit they were wrong, even to themselves. This means as an idea starts emerging as suboptimal, the people that came up with and championed it are going to be the last to see that, and will be pushing for it despite what look like clear flaws. This is probably better explained by the gambler's fallacy than Ikea effect, though.
deltasevennine 4y ago
There's an biological and evolutionary reason why humans have biases. The ideal of becoming completely unbiased and rational is not only impossible, but bad for you. The person who was unbiased, the person who didn't feel the irrational ikea effect, did not survive to reproduce you. So trying to deny your natural tendencies and natural biases can also influence your survival.
- blep_ 4y ago
  I would like to hear more about why you think there is causation between those two things, rather than just correlation.
  - deltasevennine 4y ago
    You're saying evolution did not cause bias? That it's just a correlation? The fact that all people across the world across all cultures and demographics display typical human biases that follow extremely identical patterns is a correlation? Maybe. This is an not a testable experiment. Every physical and mental aspect of your being is "caused" by your genetics which is again "caused" by natural selection... that is, in fact the theory of natural selection. To deny causation is to deny the theory of natural selection. (this is a tangent, but some would argue that environment influences the mental aspect of your being... this is true but again, your genes build your brain and ultimately controls how your brain reacts to the environment... you are still ultimately a product of your genes) I believe in natural selection, hence I believe that evolution "caused" bias to evolve in humans. That is why I think this. Does that answer your question?
    - blep_ 4y ago
      Natural selection produces good enough results. It does not necessarily produce optimal results. If there is no evolutionary pressure either for or against biases, what you get is essentially random chance. That's the null hypothesis: "we just happened to wind up with biases, because evolutionary pressure didn't care either way". I am asking you to explain what sorts of evolutionary pressure might select for these biases, because I'm not seeing it. Furthermore, I would like to know whether that still applies - if it was only useful to avoid being eaten by lions, great, but then dropping it now that we don't regularly confront lions isn't meaningfully "bad for you".
Raziarazzi 4y ago
Talk to the customers and learn about their needs and budget for the product. The designed product must meet the needs of the users and not be based on linked in research. Simply set up a stall in an Ikea store and begin surveying the needs of the customers.
walrus01 4y ago
> The IKEA effect is a finding that people tend to ascribe a higher valuation towards self-assembled products compared to objectively similar products which they did not assemble. This does explain a lot about what happens mentally when people self build an AR-15 badly without doing the book learning and research first. As compared to what they might get as a beginner by dropping two grand for something put together by professionals.
- sbierwagen 4y ago
  Hey now, my AR that won't cycle because I lost the roll pin for the gas block when building it and refuse to spend $10+shipping for just one measly little half gram piece of metal works fine; as a bolt action rifle.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    I'm sure Mr. Stoner would be very pleased.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  > This does explain a lot about what happens mentally when people self build $THING badly without doing the book learning and research first. Did I told the story about a "slow server" where a simple 87Mb MySQL database slowed down to a crawl, like up to 40-60 seconds to respond... but not because we provided bad servers. It was slow because the main query had like 20 "SELECT *" subqueries. But people who don't even understand what SQL is (despite having two programmers and one sysadmin on the team) continued to insist what the problem is with our server, because their "testing server" (a desktop with i7) worked fine. Until I forced them to load their "production data" (87Mb) to their testing server. And suddenly - it started to respond in 40-60 seconds too. Because the test set was like 3Mb (test1, test3, testadflakjfdg and so on). THEY built that PoS, so it couldn't be bad. It must be something else. And now look at r/shittycarmods or whatever it called, same motto.
santimoller66 4y ago
[flagged]
Animats 4y ago
I just think of flat-pack furniture as an easy way to get bulky objects home from the store. I don't get any feeling that I "built" something from assembling the parts.
zarzavat 4y ago
IKEA self assembly is not a good analogy for “Not invented here”. IKEA is more like the opposite of NIH. “NIH” from the manager’s perspective would be more like contracting a professional bookshelf maker to build a bookshelf for you. They go to the lumber yard, select wood, cutting, planing and nailing it together to build a perfect bookshelf. In the IKEA case you get something that works but might not fit your requirements exactly. In the NIH case you get something that is exactly what you need (hopefully), but will be much more expensive to construct and will take orders of magnitude more time. There’s no right or wrong answers. Sometimes an IKEA bookshelf is suitable. Sometimes it isn’t.
- Kwantuum 4y ago
  You are missing the point completely. The IKEA effect is not "self assembly", the IKEA effect is "I think of this piece of furniture more highly because I assembled it myself". The IKEA effect compares how people feel about the same piece of furniture when they've assembled it themselves vs when someone else did it.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    I understand that. But it’s a bad analogy. Because when when you build something yourself it’s not the same piece of furniture. You may love it because you made it, fine. But you also may love it because it’s exactly what you need. You may hate it because you tried to build it on a shoestring budget and you got what you paid for.
    - wzwy 4y ago
      I am struggling to think of a more fitting analogy to describe this overvaluation of self-assembled items. What’s similar to IKEA, as in the self-assembly bit, but also doesn’t have the “it’s exactly what I need” effect that confounds the “I love it because I assembled it myself” measurement? Or maybe I’ll just call it the Effort Effect. Ugly, but I’m not much of a marketer so I’ll take it.
      - 4y ago
Cupertino95014 4y ago
I use TaskRabbit for a lot of handyman tasks, having learned that I'm not that quick at it, and... no further excuses, I use it. At any rate, "assembling IKEA furniture" is such a popular task on TaskRabbit that it's featured on the TaskRabbit web site: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/customer-service/services/assembly/ https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/customer-service/services/assembl...
- asavadatti 4y ago
  That might be because IKEA owns taskrabbit
  - kalleboo 4y ago
    Wow, TIL. That is pretty unexpected.
    - baq 4y ago
      it isn't, really, if you think about what else IKEA does right. Ingka is just an extremely forward-looking company...
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Manufacturing will be onshored by having you do the manufacturing yourself, or paying for someone to do it in your living room, heh.
        Cupertino95014 4y ago
        Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode with Kramer's idea for the "you make the pizza" pizza shop.
  - vages 4y ago
    TIL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taskrabbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taskrabbit
  - 4y ago
hulitu 4y ago
> The IKEA effect is a finding that people tend to ascribe a higher valuation towards self-assembled products compared to objectively similar products which they did not assemble. Manager language. "people tend to ascribe a higher valuation towards self-assembled products" which are easier to dismantle and reassemble back. I assembled IKEA furniture and other furniture. When your assembly instructions are only an exploded view of the product, you don't want to do it again. The value of the product is given also by its utility, not only by its looks.
olliej 4y ago
These claims match my own experience but also confirm my own bias so I am curious as to whether there are any studies with the 106 participants.
pranav_hacker 4y ago
javascript is awesome
- tempodox 4y ago
  Was it your own idea?
throwawaysleep 4y ago
Far simpler explanation. I don't win anything if the company gets a project that succeeds. I only win as an individual if I get credit for the project. It is why when I am asked whether a project is worth doing, the answer is always yes. Not because the company gains anything, but because I need stuff for the resume that looks good. So it is in my interests to kill ideas which are not my own, as I cannot personally gain from those.
- tempodox 4y ago
  +1. Sounds very Google to me. One gets credit for inventing a new service or whatever and then the project dies because nobody gets credit for maintaining it. Woe betide the end luser who fell for it.
Thorentis 4y ago
Why is the focus on managers? This just feels like needless bashing on managers. IC can just as easily fall in love with their own bad ideas, and I have seen many ICs defend bad ideas in meetings because they don't want to admit that their original idea was a bad one. This happens to everybody.
boloust 4y ago
After reading through the original study[0], I am rather unconvinced of the significance of this effect. The experimental setup was basically: 1. Divide participants into builders or non-builders 2. Get the builders to assemble an IKEA box, and have the non-builders inspect an assembled box 3. Get the builders to bid on the box they assembled, and the non-builders to bid on the box they inspected The results sound very impressive, with the builder group bidding 63% more than the non-builder group. Looking closer, however, the absolute magnitude of the change is tiny, with the builders bidding $0.78 for their masterpiece, while the non-builders bid $0.48. It's clear that reporting a 63% bid increase makes for a more marketable study than one that reports a 30 cent difference, but it's unclear if this effect scales with larger purchases. I'm not familiar with the broader literature, but from my uninformed vantage, it seems possible that the effect declines into insignificance with larger purchases. The paper also reports a second experiment with origami, and the difference is $0.05 vs $0.23, which at least is consistent with the hypothesis that the effect size will decline as prices increase. [0]: https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/11-091.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/11-091.pdf
- TheCowboy 4y ago
  Right, the 'replication crisis' could easily hit this one study, and any study should factor in non-self-assembly coming with a price premium.
- Theodores 4y ago
  Ah, but that is where you are wrong. Facts don't apply to successful memes. You can remember the 'butterfly effect'? Yeah. Some people dined out doing Ted (x) talks on that one. To make a meme 'effect' legitimate, you need the scientific paper, ideally published in Nature. It is then a thing. Let me inspire you: "The Happy Meal Effect" - surely this one writes its own, with that enlightening twist of knowledge you lacked before, backed up by a scientific study, so it must be true? "The Dyson Effect" - just an example of doing this with a brand name. This is all about what happens when a boring product gets made high tech, expensive and desirable. "The Silly Beggar Effect" - those are two words just chosen at random. This could come with its own origin story, maybe in Cincinnati there was an incident in 1893 that (despite time and geography) led Mark Twain to coin the phrase. The pertinent quote is imagined but nobody is going to check. Just by having a silly beggar in town everyone's life improves commensurately. They don't even have any 'broken windows' thanks to the 'Silly Beggar Effect'. If you cared for American politics then you could pay an agency to promote the phrase "The Corn Pop Effect" describing it as a decline in living standards. Then do your political poll and dress it up as a scientific paper proving there is such a thing as the "Corn Pop Effect". In regular parlance any loss can be shrugged off as just "Corn Pop Effect". With enough money you could get that clumsy phrase on the lips of the world by election time, giving the 'effect' true significance. The premise of this study is not new, in the days when cake mixes were an exciting product, the marketing men discovered that it was better to not include dried egg. This necessitated adding an egg to the mixture and this made the endeavour 'baking' rather than 'cheating'. The involvement was a good thing. The 'home made baked' product was the result with the desired buy in, not the 'cheated' product.
yokoprime 4y ago
The "IKEA effect" is a _terrible_ name for "not invented here", which you know, already has a name, but it wasn't invented by the author... Kidding aside, IKEA furniture is the most off the shelf you can get. You set it up and thats it.
mxfh 4y ago
2011 surely was the last year of an Ikea era, where they made stuff that you could reassemble twice without worrying about things falling apart like glued glorified wood dust. This is a useful property to know of furniture you acquire, which can only be learned through assembly. Nowadays it's mostly just depressing build once, use and discard-at-move affairs, with some notable exceptions (STARKVIND even has a dedicated place to store the Allen key).
- zihotki 4y ago
  But it is still possible to re-assemble even 3 or 4 times. That's based on my anecdata as well as my friends' anecdata. You just need to be careful and avoid using powertools. Powertools often do a lot of damage when they tighten screws too hard.
d--b 4y ago
Why are the comments criticizing the article? This is something I have seen countless times in the industry. People create some shitty things, and then hang on to it like their lives depended on it. Then other people avoid criticizing the stuff, because "it's their baby". wtf? One of my biggest pride is to be able to say that my code is obsolete or not good enough, and be able to discard it without looking back. This is not the same thing as "not invented here". NIH happens before you build the product (should we build or buy it?). The IKEA effect happens afterwards (my crap is golden).
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  My only critique is the focus on managers. This phenomenon extends to everyone. You don't want to deal with a few hero seniors adamant their half-chewed solution is best either.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  All the examples seem to boil down to "manager wants thing he did to be useful". Sure, that might be the IKEA effect, but it seems more likely to me that they simply don't want to be perceived as having made a mistake.
codewithcheese 4y ago
What does "Spike rough prototypes" mean? I presume this is an Americanism.
- Ecstatify 4y ago
  Probably referring to a spike in "agile" https://www.wrike.com/agile-guide/faq/what-is-a-spike-story-in-agile/ https://www.wrike.com/agile-guide/faq/what-is-a-spike-story-...
josephmcfad8 4y ago
[dead]
rizach8 4y ago
I would be curious if this has any gender differences. I would imagine women are culturally less inclined to "brag" about their accomplishment than men.
tempodox 4y ago
Falling in love with one's own ideas is hardly unique to managers. I guess it can happen to anyone, and I know for a fact that it can happen to programmers.
mavu 4y ago
self_awareness 4y ago
Is it really the case that people overvalue things in which they have put effort into? Or maybe people undervalue things that are done by other people?
- globalreset 4y ago
  Exactly. It's rational to value something we have confidence how it was made, and we know the internals of it already. Similarly with NIH syndrome. There is certain rational part in valuing internal knowledge, and "building to size" for own needs.
wzwy 4y ago
This post reminds me of this excerpt from the book How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard: > What many organizations do to assess risk is not very enlightening. The methods I propose for assessing risk would be familiar to an actuary, statistician, or financial analyst. But some of the most popular methods for measuring risk look nothing like what an actuary might be familiar with. Many organizations simply say a risk is “high,” “medium,” or “low.” Or perhaps they rate it on a scale of 1 to 5. When I find situations like this, I sometimes ask how much “medium” risk really is. Is a 5% chance of losing more than $5 million a low, medium, or high risk? Nobody knows. Is a medium-risk investment with a 15% return on investment better or worse than a high-risk investment with a 50% return? Again, nobody knows because the statements themselves are ambiguous. […] It is true that many of the users of these methods will report that they feel much more confident in their decisions as a result. But, as we will see in Chapter 12, this feeling should not be confused with evidence of effectiveness. We will learn that studies have shown that it is quite possible to experience an increase in confidence about decisions and forecasts without actually improving things—or even by making them worse. For now, just know that there is apparently a strong placebo effect in many decision analysis and risk analysis methods. Managers need to start to be able to tell the difference between feeling better about decisions and actually having better track records over time. There must be measured evidence that decisions and forecasts actually improved. Unfortunately, risk analysis or risk management—or decision analysis in general—rarely has a performance metric of its own. 3The good news is that some methods have been measured, and they show a real improvement.
mrjin 4y ago
Went to IKEA once and did not find what we wanted but did buy something small gadgets. Unfortunately, the very 1st time experience just taught me I should not trust them for anything. In those items, there were 3 looked very similar, two were a couple of dollars cheaper than the other one. I reminded the cashier they were different when I noticed him scanned the more expensive one 3 times. And you guess what, he removed those 2 extra and scanned them back again. So when I checked the receipt and asked him why. He said sorry and referred us to the returns and I waited around half an hour, during which time they managed to process 5 or 6 returns and there were more or less 20 before me. So I left and lodged complaint on their website. Since there wasn't much and I almost forgot about it at all. Quite a few weeks later, I received an email from them stating "Thanks for sending us an email. We sincerely apologise for the delayed response and thank you for your patience. Unfortunately, we were experiencing technical difficulties with our email inbox at the time of your enquiry.". That was it, end of story.
mytydev 4y ago
This is less of a critique and more of an additional thought to this study. We tend to place higher value on things where we have at least a partial understanding of the creation process. Thought. Are we also undervaluing things where we have no understanding of the process at which it was created?
black_13 4y ago
tpoacher 4y ago
It's a personal pet peeve of mine when people invent a new name for a phenomenon that's been around for ages. In this particular case, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effort_justification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effort_justification, with classic experiments dating back to the 50ies. Yet, give it a couple of moons, and next time you try to explain what effort justification is, some dolt will be like "Oh you mean the IKEA effect?" Reminds me of a prof I once had, who taught nanoparticles. He said "We used to just call this stuff 'chemistry', but then we realised we got published a lot more easily if we started putting 'nano' in front of everything".

> people tend to ascribe a higher valuation towards self-assembled products compared to objectively similar products which they did not assemble While I agree with the potential hazards of this kind of thinking, I'd be interested to see some positives in addition to just the "pitfalls". Better idea of valuation of labor in addition to materials? Reduction of waste? Some intangible "what we learned along the way" factor?

zorpner 4y ago
Offhand, an understanding of the assembly and internal mechanics of a product from having built it would make me feel like I would be be more likely to be able to fix it if required.
- michaelchisari 4y ago
  Right and the opposite of "Not Invented Here" can be layers upon layers of magical abstraction that nobody understands.
friendzis 4y ago
From my own observations there two general reasons: * Assembly is seen as [near] zero value add step, therefore self assembling is seen as an easy opportunity for savings, especially when assembly is actually sold service. * People think that assembly is generally done by minimum wage employees coasting through the day and half assing tasks, therefore self assembly with a little bit of focus and dedication is seen to lead to higher than default assembly quality.

progre 4y ago

From "self assebled box" to "managers own idea", thats quite a jump. There are lots of reasons why people push their own solutions. To stake a claim of expertise in an area, the need to impress peers and reports, genuine ignorance of other solutions...

gregmac 4y ago
Agreed. The benefits of their idea working out are huge, but so is the personal negative impact of it failing -- even if the outcome for the company is better. A lot of people also find it really difficult to admit they were wrong, even to themselves. This means as an idea starts emerging as suboptimal, the people that came up with and championed it are going to be the last to see that, and will be pushing for it despite what look like clear flaws. This is probably better explained by the gambler's fallacy than Ikea effect, though.

deltasevennine 4y ago

There's an biological and evolutionary reason why humans have biases. The ideal of becoming completely unbiased and rational is not only impossible, but bad for you. The person who was unbiased, the person who didn't feel the irrational ikea effect, did not survive to reproduce you. So trying to deny your natural tendencies and natural biases can also influence your survival.

blep_ 4y ago
I would like to hear more about why you think there is causation between those two things, rather than just correlation.
- deltasevennine 4y ago
  You're saying evolution did not cause bias? That it's just a correlation? The fact that all people across the world across all cultures and demographics display typical human biases that follow extremely identical patterns is a correlation? Maybe. This is an not a testable experiment. Every physical and mental aspect of your being is "caused" by your genetics which is again "caused" by natural selection... that is, in fact the theory of natural selection. To deny causation is to deny the theory of natural selection. (this is a tangent, but some would argue that environment influences the mental aspect of your being... this is true but again, your genes build your brain and ultimately controls how your brain reacts to the environment... you are still ultimately a product of your genes) I believe in natural selection, hence I believe that evolution "caused" bias to evolve in humans. That is why I think this. Does that answer your question?
  - blep_ 4y ago
    Natural selection produces good enough results. It does not necessarily produce optimal results. If there is no evolutionary pressure either for or against biases, what you get is essentially random chance. That's the null hypothesis: "we just happened to wind up with biases, because evolutionary pressure didn't care either way". I am asking you to explain what sorts of evolutionary pressure might select for these biases, because I'm not seeing it. Furthermore, I would like to know whether that still applies - if it was only useful to avoid being eaten by lions, great, but then dropping it now that we don't regularly confront lions isn't meaningfully "bad for you".

Raziarazzi 4y ago

Talk to the customers and learn about their needs and budget for the product. The designed product must meet the needs of the users and not be based on linked in research. Simply set up a stall in an Ikea store and begin surveying the needs of the customers.

walrus01 4y ago

> The IKEA effect is a finding that people tend to ascribe a higher valuation towards self-assembled products compared to objectively similar products which they did not assemble. This does explain a lot about what happens mentally when people self build an AR-15 badly without doing the book learning and research first. As compared to what they might get as a beginner by dropping two grand for something put together by professionals.

sbierwagen 4y ago
Hey now, my AR that won't cycle because I lost the roll pin for the gas block when building it and refuse to spend $10+shipping for just one measly little half gram piece of metal works fine; as a bolt action rifle.
- walrus01 4y ago
  I'm sure Mr. Stoner would be very pleased.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
> This does explain a lot about what happens mentally when people self build $THING badly without doing the book learning and research first. Did I told the story about a "slow server" where a simple 87Mb MySQL database slowed down to a crawl, like up to 40-60 seconds to respond... but not because we provided bad servers. It was slow because the main query had like 20 "SELECT *" subqueries. But people who don't even understand what SQL is (despite having two programmers and one sysadmin on the team) continued to insist what the problem is with our server, because their "testing server" (a desktop with i7) worked fine. Until I forced them to load their "production data" (87Mb) to their testing server. And suddenly - it started to respond in 40-60 seconds too. Because the test set was like 3Mb (test1, test3, testadflakjfdg and so on). THEY built that PoS, so it couldn't be bad. It must be something else. And now look at r/shittycarmods or whatever it called, same motto.

santimoller66 4y ago

[flagged]

Animats 4y ago

I just think of flat-pack furniture as an easy way to get bulky objects home from the store. I don't get any feeling that I "built" something from assembling the parts.

zarzavat 4y ago

IKEA self assembly is not a good analogy for “Not invented here”. IKEA is more like the opposite of NIH. “NIH” from the manager’s perspective would be more like contracting a professional bookshelf maker to build a bookshelf for you. They go to the lumber yard, select wood, cutting, planing and nailing it together to build a perfect bookshelf. In the IKEA case you get something that works but might not fit your requirements exactly. In the NIH case you get something that is exactly what you need (hopefully), but will be much more expensive to construct and will take orders of magnitude more time. There’s no right or wrong answers. Sometimes an IKEA bookshelf is suitable. Sometimes it isn’t.

Kwantuum 4y ago
You are missing the point completely. The IKEA effect is not "self assembly", the IKEA effect is "I think of this piece of furniture more highly because I assembled it myself". The IKEA effect compares how people feel about the same piece of furniture when they've assembled it themselves vs when someone else did it.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  I understand that. But it’s a bad analogy. Because when when you build something yourself it’s not the same piece of furniture. You may love it because you made it, fine. But you also may love it because it’s exactly what you need. You may hate it because you tried to build it on a shoestring budget and you got what you paid for.
  - wzwy 4y ago
    I am struggling to think of a more fitting analogy to describe this overvaluation of self-assembled items. What’s similar to IKEA, as in the self-assembly bit, but also doesn’t have the “it’s exactly what I need” effect that confounds the “I love it because I assembled it myself” measurement? Or maybe I’ll just call it the Effort Effect. Ugly, but I’m not much of a marketer so I’ll take it.
    - 4y ago

Cupertino95014 4y ago

I use TaskRabbit for a lot of handyman tasks, having learned that I'm not that quick at it, and... no further excuses, I use it. At any rate, "assembling IKEA furniture" is such a popular task on TaskRabbit that it's featured on the TaskRabbit web site: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/customer-service/services/assembly/ https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/customer-service/services/assembl...

asavadatti 4y ago
That might be because IKEA owns taskrabbit
- kalleboo 4y ago
  Wow, TIL. That is pretty unexpected.
  - baq 4y ago
    it isn't, really, if you think about what else IKEA does right. Ingka is just an extremely forward-looking company...
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Manufacturing will be onshored by having you do the manufacturing yourself, or paying for someone to do it in your living room, heh.
      - Cupertino95014 4y ago
        Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode with Kramer's idea for the "you make the pizza" pizza shop.
- vages 4y ago
  TIL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taskrabbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taskrabbit
- 4y ago

hulitu 4y ago

> The IKEA effect is a finding that people tend to ascribe a higher valuation towards self-assembled products compared to objectively similar products which they did not assemble. Manager language. "people tend to ascribe a higher valuation towards self-assembled products" which are easier to dismantle and reassemble back. I assembled IKEA furniture and other furniture. When your assembly instructions are only an exploded view of the product, you don't want to do it again. The value of the product is given also by its utility, not only by its looks.

olliej 4y ago

These claims match my own experience but also confirm my own bias so I am curious as to whether there are any studies with the 106 participants.

pranav_hacker 4y ago

javascript is awesome

tempodox 4y ago
Was it your own idea?

throwawaysleep 4y ago

Far simpler explanation. I don't win anything if the company gets a project that succeeds. I only win as an individual if I get credit for the project. It is why when I am asked whether a project is worth doing, the answer is always yes. Not because the company gains anything, but because I need stuff for the resume that looks good. So it is in my interests to kill ideas which are not my own, as I cannot personally gain from those.

tempodox 4y ago
+1. Sounds very Google to me. One gets credit for inventing a new service or whatever and then the project dies because nobody gets credit for maintaining it. Woe betide the end luser who fell for it.

Thorentis 4y ago

Why is the focus on managers? This just feels like needless bashing on managers. IC can just as easily fall in love with their own bad ideas, and I have seen many ICs defend bad ideas in meetings because they don't want to admit that their original idea was a bad one. This happens to everybody.

boloust 4y ago

After reading through the original study[0], I am rather unconvinced of the significance of this effect. The experimental setup was basically: 1. Divide participants into builders or non-builders 2. Get the builders to assemble an IKEA box, and have the non-builders inspect an assembled box 3. Get the builders to bid on the box they assembled, and the non-builders to bid on the box they inspected The results sound very impressive, with the builder group bidding 63% more than the non-builder group. Looking closer, however, the absolute magnitude of the change is tiny, with the builders bidding $0.78 for their masterpiece, while the non-builders bid $0.48. It's clear that reporting a 63% bid increase makes for a more marketable study than one that reports a 30 cent difference, but it's unclear if this effect scales with larger purchases. I'm not familiar with the broader literature, but from my uninformed vantage, it seems possible that the effect declines into insignificance with larger purchases. The paper also reports a second experiment with origami, and the difference is $0.05 vs $0.23, which at least is consistent with the hypothesis that the effect size will decline as prices increase. [0]: https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/11-091.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/11-091.pdf

TheCowboy 4y ago
Right, the 'replication crisis' could easily hit this one study, and any study should factor in non-self-assembly coming with a price premium.
Theodores 4y ago
Ah, but that is where you are wrong. Facts don't apply to successful memes. You can remember the 'butterfly effect'? Yeah. Some people dined out doing Ted (x) talks on that one. To make a meme 'effect' legitimate, you need the scientific paper, ideally published in Nature. It is then a thing. Let me inspire you: "The Happy Meal Effect" - surely this one writes its own, with that enlightening twist of knowledge you lacked before, backed up by a scientific study, so it must be true? "The Dyson Effect" - just an example of doing this with a brand name. This is all about what happens when a boring product gets made high tech, expensive and desirable. "The Silly Beggar Effect" - those are two words just chosen at random. This could come with its own origin story, maybe in Cincinnati there was an incident in 1893 that (despite time and geography) led Mark Twain to coin the phrase. The pertinent quote is imagined but nobody is going to check. Just by having a silly beggar in town everyone's life improves commensurately. They don't even have any 'broken windows' thanks to the 'Silly Beggar Effect'. If you cared for American politics then you could pay an agency to promote the phrase "The Corn Pop Effect" describing it as a decline in living standards. Then do your political poll and dress it up as a scientific paper proving there is such a thing as the "Corn Pop Effect". In regular parlance any loss can be shrugged off as just "Corn Pop Effect". With enough money you could get that clumsy phrase on the lips of the world by election time, giving the 'effect' true significance. The premise of this study is not new, in the days when cake mixes were an exciting product, the marketing men discovered that it was better to not include dried egg. This necessitated adding an egg to the mixture and this made the endeavour 'baking' rather than 'cheating'. The involvement was a good thing. The 'home made baked' product was the result with the desired buy in, not the 'cheated' product.

yokoprime 4y ago

The "IKEA effect" is a _terrible_ name for "not invented here", which you know, already has a name, but it wasn't invented by the author... Kidding aside, IKEA furniture is the most off the shelf you can get. You set it up and thats it.

mxfh 4y ago

2011 surely was the last year of an Ikea era, where they made stuff that you could reassemble twice without worrying about things falling apart like glued glorified wood dust. This is a useful property to know of furniture you acquire, which can only be learned through assembly. Nowadays it's mostly just depressing build once, use and discard-at-move affairs, with some notable exceptions (STARKVIND even has a dedicated place to store the Allen key).

zihotki 4y ago
But it is still possible to re-assemble even 3 or 4 times. That's based on my anecdata as well as my friends' anecdata. You just need to be careful and avoid using powertools. Powertools often do a lot of damage when they tighten screws too hard.

d--b 4y ago

Why are the comments criticizing the article? This is something I have seen countless times in the industry. People create some shitty things, and then hang on to it like their lives depended on it. Then other people avoid criticizing the stuff, because "it's their baby". wtf? One of my biggest pride is to be able to say that my code is obsolete or not good enough, and be able to discard it without looking back. This is not the same thing as "not invented here". NIH happens before you build the product (should we build or buy it?). The IKEA effect happens afterwards (my crap is golden).

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
My only critique is the focus on managers. This phenomenon extends to everyone. You don't want to deal with a few hero seniors adamant their half-chewed solution is best either.
wongarsu 4y ago
All the examples seem to boil down to "manager wants thing he did to be useful". Sure, that might be the IKEA effect, but it seems more likely to me that they simply don't want to be perceived as having made a mistake.

codewithcheese 4y ago

What does "Spike rough prototypes" mean? I presume this is an Americanism.

Ecstatify 4y ago
Probably referring to a spike in "agile" https://www.wrike.com/agile-guide/faq/what-is-a-spike-story-in-agile/ https://www.wrike.com/agile-guide/faq/what-is-a-spike-story-...

josephmcfad8 4y ago

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rizach8 4y ago

I would be curious if this has any gender differences. I would imagine women are culturally less inclined to "brag" about their accomplishment than men.

tempodox 4y ago

Falling in love with one's own ideas is hardly unique to managers. I guess it can happen to anyone, and I know for a fact that it can happen to programmers.

mavu 4y ago

self_awareness 4y ago

Is it really the case that people overvalue things in which they have put effort into? Or maybe people undervalue things that are done by other people?

globalreset 4y ago
Exactly. It's rational to value something we have confidence how it was made, and we know the internals of it already. Similarly with NIH syndrome. There is certain rational part in valuing internal knowledge, and "building to size" for own needs.

wzwy 4y ago

This post reminds me of this excerpt from the book How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard: > What many organizations do to assess risk is not very enlightening. The methods I propose for assessing risk would be familiar to an actuary, statistician, or financial analyst. But some of the most popular methods for measuring risk look nothing like what an actuary might be familiar with. Many organizations simply say a risk is “high,” “medium,” or “low.” Or perhaps they rate it on a scale of 1 to 5. When I find situations like this, I sometimes ask how much “medium” risk really is. Is a 5% chance of losing more than $5 million a low, medium, or high risk? Nobody knows. Is a medium-risk investment with a 15% return on investment better or worse than a high-risk investment with a 50% return? Again, nobody knows because the statements themselves are ambiguous. […] It is true that many of the users of these methods will report that they feel much more confident in their decisions as a result. But, as we will see in Chapter 12, this feeling should not be confused with evidence of effectiveness. We will learn that studies have shown that it is quite possible to experience an increase in confidence about decisions and forecasts without actually improving things—or even by making them worse. For now, just know that there is apparently a strong placebo effect in many decision analysis and risk analysis methods. Managers need to start to be able to tell the difference between feeling better about decisions and actually having better track records over time. There must be measured evidence that decisions and forecasts actually improved. Unfortunately, risk analysis or risk management—or decision analysis in general—rarely has a performance metric of its own. 3The good news is that some methods have been measured, and they show a real improvement.

mrjin 4y ago

Went to IKEA once and did not find what we wanted but did buy something small gadgets. Unfortunately, the very 1st time experience just taught me I should not trust them for anything. In those items, there were 3 looked very similar, two were a couple of dollars cheaper than the other one. I reminded the cashier they were different when I noticed him scanned the more expensive one 3 times. And you guess what, he removed those 2 extra and scanned them back again. So when I checked the receipt and asked him why. He said sorry and referred us to the returns and I waited around half an hour, during which time they managed to process 5 or 6 returns and there were more or less 20 before me. So I left and lodged complaint on their website. Since there wasn't much and I almost forgot about it at all. Quite a few weeks later, I received an email from them stating "Thanks for sending us an email. We sincerely apologise for the delayed response and thank you for your patience. Unfortunately, we were experiencing technical difficulties with our email inbox at the time of your enquiry.". That was it, end of story.

mytydev 4y ago

This is less of a critique and more of an additional thought to this study. We tend to place higher value on things where we have at least a partial understanding of the creation process. Thought. Are we also undervaluing things where we have no understanding of the process at which it was created?

black_13 4y ago

tpoacher 4y ago

It's a personal pet peeve of mine when people invent a new name for a phenomenon that's been around for ages. In this particular case, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effort_justification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effort_justification, with classic experiments dating back to the 50ies. Yet, give it a couple of moons, and next time you try to explain what effort justification is, some dolt will be like "Oh you mean the IKEA effect?" Reminds me of a prof I once had, who taught nanoparticles. He said "We used to just call this stuff 'chemistry', but then we realised we got published a lot more easily if we started putting 'nano' in front of everything".