Creative Endowment Effect: People Submit More Low-Quality Ideas When Picking Their Own
yangyi · x · 2026-09-08
A new arXiv paper (Kim & Newman, published in Sci Rep) documents the "Creative Endowment Effect": in an incentive-compatible experiment, participants submitted more low-quality ideas when selecting from ideas they generated themselves than from someone else's.
Key findings
- The effect held across three tasks in two domains and persisted even when participants were explicitly told about it.
- Revisiting one's ideas several months later restored selectivity.
Implications
- Idea review should avoid self-selection; cross-panel review (Group A picks Group B's ideas) works better.
- The same logic applies to agents: generating and selecting agents should be separated, as agents favor their own outputs.
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