[astrocat]

I think you may be missing a bit of the nuance of the IKEA effect - it's not about superfluous assembly, but rather providing a context in which a little bit of user effort is massively amplified to produce results otherwise unobtainable. Take a look at the chart of the sweet spot for IKEA effect: high value with high contribution and minimal effort. The contribution the user puts into the final IKEA product is really huge - going from a flatpack of scraps to a complete piece of furniture - while the effort to do so is arguably pretty minimal.

[logicallee]

fair criticism of my reading. Still, there are no AB tests at various points on that chart (different real-world examples that were actually AB tested) - it's just theory.

Surely you can agree with me that AB tests can't hurt. Anyone can say something plausible, after all! (Just see this comment thread - literally every commenter in the thread says something plausible that I could agree with, including you.) The only rigorous experiment the article mentions is about guessing the value of pre-assembled and unassembled Origami cranes.

This is obviously a problematic proxy for real-world products that manufacturers actually sell.