The IKEA Effect: Why We Keep Failing Projects Alive

Even when signals and coworkers tell us that a project may not work, we push to finish.  We could have exhausted all resources and be well beyond our deadline, but we refuse to say enough is enough.

Why is this?  After all, our time could be better spent on our projects and more innovative ideas.  Michael Norton, for the Harvard Business Review, calls it “The IKEA Effect.”  Imagine assembling a complicated piece of furniture.  Regardless of how much you paid for the piece, you’re unlikely to give up assembling the item until it is finished.  It may take hours to put together a $20 chair, but you continue.  You don’t admit to yourself that you could have performed other tasks, or multiple other tasks, in the same time frame.

Norton adds:

Research conducted with my colleagues Daniel Mochon, of Yale University, and Dan Ariely, of Duke University, shows that labor enhances affection for its results. When people construct products themselves, from bookshelves to Build-a-Bears, they come to overvalue their (often poorly made) creations. We call this phenomenon the IKEA effect, in honor of the wildly successful Swedish manufacturer whose products typically arrive with some assembly required.

In one of our studies we asked people to fold origami and then to bid on their own creations along with other people’s. They were consistently willing to pay more for their own origami. In fact, they were so enamored of their amateurish creations that they valued them as highly as origami made by experts.

Modern executives should take a moment to consider the projects in their lives they’ve refused to abandon because of time commitment.  Unfortunately, sometimes personal relationships are the same way.  What are you doing, or have you been doing, that uses time better spent elsewhere?