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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

I'd be interested to know how the feelings change if theyve owned the piece of furniture for like a year, rather than having just felt the efforts of putting it together, etc. ie. does the value of the build effect drop off a cliff after the efforts of putting it together are no longer relevant to the builder.

Conjecture: The non-builders will have grown attached to it and the builders will be like, this is old and has various shortcomings, I can build something better.

For me after a year I feel a sense of achievement if it's still standing/in one piece.

That is not correct either. Who considers finishing an IKEA build an achievement?

Read about Betty Crocker's "just add egg" campaign.

I feel way more pride in a Betty Crocker cake than I do about all the Ikea furniture I've built. My Ikea furniture is just cheap but functional furniture. I feel no attachment whatsoever. Anymore than I do taking a toilet paper roll out of the bag and "assembling it into the TP holder"

I feel a sense of accomplishment for few hours after having completed assembly but it's not really much more if any more than the sense of accomplishment I feel when I've finished vacuuming and dusting my apartment.

It's really not that it's necessarily an achievement, it's a subconscious bias to value the same product higher than if you don't invest time in building it.

It's a kind of "you're rewarded for your effort" idea.

I like the cake mix example where letting the consumer add eggs made house wives happier with the cake from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-shaping-us/20191...

This article about IKEA boxes sounds a lot like the cake mix marketing story. But apparently, that story is a legend: https://gobraithwaite.com/thinking/cake-mixes-fresh-eggs-and...

And maybe this study should be taken with a grain of salt too.

I love building Ikea furniture. It gives me a feeling of completing something that I rarely get building software, where everything is a work in progress. I'm not very good at DIY or craft stuff in general.

It's a TERRIBLE analogy! IKEA is, if anything, an analogy for setting things up yourself, that's it.

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