Concept · Cognitive Bias: Economic and consumer biases
IKEA effect
Origin: Norton, Mochon & Ariely, 2012
Biological Parallel
Spider silk is metabolically expensive—up to 10% of daily energy budget. Spiders value and defend self-constructed webs far more intensely than they do abandoned webs they encounter, even of identical quality. The construction effort creates ownership through invested calories. The IKEA effect mirrors this: assembly effort doesn't improve the furniture, but it embeds your metabolic investment, triggering the same valuation boost that kept ancestral builders attached to their costly creations.