The IKEA effect in human-AI collaboration: Does the effect exist for non-physical products? Part I.

According to the IKEA effect, people are willing to pay more for a product they have created through their own perceived effort than they would for an off-the-shelf product. In our research, we investigated whether the IKEA effect would exist (1) if ChatGPT were also involved in creating the product and (2) if the final product is textual content. We conducted a randomized controlled trial that included all the background factors known to jointly trigger the IKEA effect.
Our results show that the IKEA effect can be detected in human-AI collaboration when the product is non-physical content. We have demonstrated that participants (1) produced a superior product based on their subjective preferences and (2) would purchase it at a higher price. However, in our research, (3) the IKEA effect applied not only to the end product, but also to the instrument: members of the IKEA group were more satisfied with ChatGPT and would pay more for the application in terms of the product they created.
Thus, by including all known background factors that jointly trigger the IKEA effect, we have successfully refuted previous studies that were unable to prove the IKEA effect in the field of text generation.
Artificial intelligence is a technological opportunity that allows shoppers to personalize products or select and access them more quickly. The IKEA effect could be exploited in this area. Our paper contributes to the practical identification of the boundary conditions necessary to trigger the effect.

1 Introduction

1.1 The importance of the topic

In the field of online marketing, it is also of paramount importance to identify the factors that can improve sales results, whether it is the willingness to buy or the average basket value. This is where the IKEA effect comes into play: if a company has the right target group knowledge, it can leverage the effect to achieve spectacular improvements in sales results. Research has shown that customers are 63% more likely to pay when the IKEA effect is present (Norton et al. 2012). Exploring and analyzing the relationship and synergies between the effect and AI can be of significant value from a sales perspective, as multiple implementations of human-AI collaboration are likely to emerge in the future.

1.2 The IKEA effect

In 2012, Norton et al. identified and named the IKEA effect in their research, defining it as an increased consumers’ valuation of products assembled by themselves, in terms of both liking and willingness to pay, compared to an objectively similar but pre-assembled product. The effect takes its name from the Swedish furniture chain IKEA, which sells furniture that requires significant assembly.
As Norton et al. note, the effect is based on a psychological phenomenon called effort justification, which Festinger (1957) demonstrated in his work on cognitive dissonance: the more effort you put into something, the more you value it. So, the phenomenon itself, in its general form and not in a business context, has been known for almost seventy years.

1.3 Research history

In the Norton et al. (2012) study cited above, customers assembled IKEA products, folded origami, and built Lego sets. úFinally, (3) the boundary conditions of the IKEA effect were examined, i.e., whether the complete completion of handmade products is necessary to trigger the effect, and whether the existence of the effect is influenced by the customer’s perception of himself as a do-it-yourselfer. A randomized control group method with 20-20 participants was used, i.e. the participants were randomly divided into „builder“ and „non-builder“ groups and the results of the two groups were compared: how much they would pay for the product and how much they liked the product on a scale of 1-7. The non-builder group was also given the opportunity to examine the product in more detail before bidding/evaluating. The results showed that the builders bid 63% higher for their product and their rating was significantly higher. When testing the need for full completion of the tasks, builders and incomplete builders were compared, with 39 participants involved. Need for completion of the tasks was demonstrated for both price and preference. However, no effect was observed for engagement in labor.
Sarstedt et al. (2016) replicated and extended the studies by Norton et al. (2012) and Mochon et al. (2012) on the IKEA effect, finding that psychological ownership (the feeling that „this is my creation”) was the main driver behind why people value self-assembled products more. (Sarstedt et al. 2016). Radtke et al. (2019) found that the IKEA effect also applies in the context of meal planning and preparation involving children in this process led to a positive relationship with vegetable intake (Radtke et al. 2019). Thus, IKEA effect exists not only in case of consumer goods which was examined by Norton et al. (2012).
While Norton et al. (2012) focused on tangible products, other studies have examined the IKEA effect in relation to intangible products, resulting in mixed results. For instance, Brunner et al. (2023) found no IKEA effect in financial decisions, (Brunner et al. 2023) while Mehler et al. (2024) observed the effect in the context of image creation (Mehler et al. 2024). These divergent findings suggest that the IKEA effect may be context-dependent.
In human-AI collaboration, Schecter and Richardson (2025) investigated the role of generative AI in shaping perceptions of value. They explored two roles of AI in human collaboration (driver and advisor) and found that the role assigned to AI significantly influenced how people perceived both its value and their own contribution. Although AI enhances creativity, workers often fear that AI-assisted work may be devalued due to concerns around authenticity. Interestingly, openly acknowledging AI’s contribution was found to increase the perceived value of the work. Additionally, task type mattered: AI had a clearer positive effect on creative tasks, but less so on objective tasks like summarizing (Schecter and Richardson 2025).
Further exploring human-AI collaboration, Jacquemin et al. (2025) examined the emotional dynamics among developers. They found that generative AI significantly improved coding task performance and speed without negatively affecting users’ emotions. Although emotional responses didn’t differ between AI-assisted and non-assisted tasks, positive feelings were still correlated with better task outcomes (Jacquemin et al. 2025).
Weinert et al. (2020) study examined the role of AI-based methods in personnel selection and employer branding, providing first empirical evidence that using modern AI methods in HR positively affects perceived employer attractiveness and showed that highlighting AI use in recruiting materials can enhance perceptions of the employer, regardless of an applicant’s individual level of technology acceptance (Weiner et al. 2020).
The presence of the IKEA effect in human-AI collaborations was investigated in a recent study by Mehler et al. (2024). The research focused on image and text generation, building on the Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT applications. It was conducted with 174 participants in an online format, with participants collaborating with AI to produce a piece of content with high or low workload. As a text, participants had to create a text about a company mission statement. The researchers were able to detect the IKEA effect for image creation, but not for text generation. In other words, it was shown that (1) the IKEA effect does not only exist for physical products, it can also be detected when generating visual content (2) the IKEA effect also exists when working together with generative AI. The researchers also investigated whether (3) the intention to use modern technology increases when participants make an effort to collaborate with AI, and they were able to detect this effect in the IKEA group.
Thus, Mehler et al. (2024) were unable to demonstrate the existence of the IKEA effect for collaboration with ChatGPT but could for collaboration with Stable Diffusion image generation software. As a reason for this, the authors assumed, based on feedback from participants, that reading and interpreting text is more exhausting than looking at and interpreting images. Conversely, our assumption was that if the IKEA effect could be detected in image generation, then it also exists in text generation, it was just that the task itself was not well chosen to detect the IKEA effect. Participants in the Mehler et al. study (2024) had to generate a mission statement for a company, which we hypothesized was not an appropriate task to detect the IKEA effect. Note that Norton et al.’s research (2012) focused on activities that do not require specialized knowledge and the success of the product can be easily judged (origami folding, Lego and furniture assembly), whereas the creation of a mission statement is a task that requires professional knowledge and cannot be judged by a layperson. Thus, the task was not actually completed, the experience of success was lost, and we saw that when the task was only half completed, Norton et al. (2012) were unable to detect the IKEA effect.
Based on the above literature review, our hypothesis is that, contrary to the findings of Mehler et al. (2024), the IKEA effect also exists in the case of textual products and AI-human collaboration, if the experiment is designed under all the conditions that jointly trigger the IKEA effect (see Morton et al. 2012).

1.4 Main goal of our study

The main goal of our study was to prove that the IKEA effect still exists (1) when the participants create a non-physical, textual product and (2) when the participants perform the work in collaboration with human artificial intelligence, specifically ChatGPT, (3) provided that the creation of the product does not require special knowledge, but (4) requires substantial perceived effort, and (5) the quality of the product can be easily assessed. (6) We also aimed to measure the magnitude of the effect.
When measuring the magnitude of the effect, following the original method of Norton et al. (2012), product quality was defined in terms of subjective satisfaction and the price that participants were willing to pay for it. We also investigated whether participation in such a collaboration positively changes the perception of AI.
In more detail, the following aspects were taken into account when designing our research:
1. the task should elicit a perceived effort from the participants, so we expected longer texts to be generated,
2. research participants can judge the output of the task and thus perceive success,
3. the task should be carried out through the collaboration of human and artificial intelligence,
4. the task should not require specific knowledge (neither technological nor professional), because if the research participants cannot do the task, the task will be abandoned and the IKEA effect will dissipate.

End of Part I.

Poznámky/Notes

[1] All research questionnaires can be found in the online appendix. Available at: <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392862672_Research_documentation_for_the_paper_entitled_The_IKEA_effect_in_human-AI_collaboration_-Does_the_effect_exist_for_non-_physical_products_published_in_Marketing_Science_Inspirations_June_2025>
[2] The control group also included an unrealistically high price of HUF 50,000 per month, this outlier was excluded from the analysis (as a presumed typo).

Literatúra/List of References

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3. Jacquemin, P. H., Gräf, M., Bauch, K., Kaur, A. and Mehler, M., 2025. When feelings meet code: How generative AI affects the emotions of developers. In: AMCIS 2025 Proceedings. 4, 2025. [online]. [cit. 2025-05-11]. Available at: <https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2025/sig_cnow/sig_cnow/4>
4. Festinger, L., 1957. A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press, 1957. ISBN 9780804709118.
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6. Norton, M. I., Mochon, D. and Ariely, D., 2012. The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love. In: Journal of Consumer Psychology. 2012, 22(3), 453-460. ISSN 1532-7663. Available at: <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2011.08.002>
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Kľúčové slová/Key words

IKEA effect, artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, human and artificial intelligence collaboration
IKEA efekt, umelá inteligencia, ChatGPT, spolupráca ľudskej a umelej inteligencie

JEL klasifikácia/JEL Classification

M31

Résumé

IKEA efekt v spolupráci človeka s umelou inteligenciou: Existuje tento efekt aj v prípade nefyzických výrobkov? Časť I.
Podľa IKEA efektu sú ľudia ochotní zaplatiť viac za výrobok, ktorý vytvorili vlastným úsilím, ako za hotový výrobok. V našom výskume sme zisťovali, či bude IKEA efekt existovať (1), ak sa na tvorbe produktu podieľa aj ChatGPT a (2), ak je konečným produktom textový obsah. Vykonali sme randomizovanú kontrolovanú štúdiu, ktorá zahŕňala všetky základné faktory, o ktorých je známe, že spoločne vyvolávajú IKEA efekt.
Naše výsledky ukazujú, že IKEA efekt možno zistiť pri spolupráci človeka a umelej inteligencie, ak je produktom nefyzický obsah. Preukázali sme, že účastníci (1) na základe svojich subjektívnych preferencií vyrobili lepší produkt a (2) kúpili by ho za vyššiu cenu. V našom výskume sa však (3) IKEA efekt uplatnil nielen na konečný produkt, ale aj na nástroj: členovia skupiny IKEA boli s aplikáciou ChatGPT spokojnejší a zaplatili by za ňu viac z hľadiska vytvoreného produktu.
Zahrnutím všetkých známych základných faktorov, ktoré spoločne vyvolávajú IKEA efekt, sme teda úspešne vyvrátili predchádzajúce štúdie, ktoré neboli schopné dokázať IKEA efekt v oblasti tvorby textu.
Umelá inteligencia je technologická príležitosť, ktorá umožňuje kupujúcim personalizovať výrobky alebo rýchlejšie si ich vybrať a dostať sa k nim. V tejto oblasti by sa mohol využiť IKEA efekt. Náš článok prispieva k praktickej identifikácii hraničných podmienok potrebných na spustenie efektu.

Recenzované/Reviewed

1. April 2025 / 24. May 2025