Duke Research Advantage

Dan Ariely’s research on “the IKEA effect” is featured in Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Business Ideas for 2009. Dan and his collaborators argue that customers tend to overvalue products like IKEA furniture because they have invested personal time and energy in their creation and assembly.  Managers are also not immune to the IKEA effect, Dan argues, because their judgment of projects’ value is likely to be clouded by previous investments of time and energy in those projects, making it more difficult for managers to pull the plug when things don’t work out.