Determine how revision affects the Creative Endowment Effect

Determine whether the Creative Endowment Effect is mitigated during the revision and development of ideas or instead compounds as initially retained ideas shape subsequent development.

Background

The paper establishes the Creative Endowment Effect (CEE): creators retain more of their own ideas than of ideas generated by others, including additional ideas of lower externally rated quality. The authors note that their experimental tasks involve immediate generation and selection, whereas organizational creative work commonly includes iteration, collaboration, drafting, and structured review.

The unresolved issue is whether these later stages reduce the initial bias by allowing creators to reconsider their ideas over time, or amplify it because the initially retained ideas determine which concepts receive further development. The paper explicitly presents both possibilities without resolving them.

References

Findings of fixation during AI-assisted creation and fewer original ideas when assistance is used from the beginning leave open which inquiry history produced the result.

— Early Epistemic Settlement in AI-Assisted Writing  (2609.09332 - Wang, 8 Sep 2026) in Section 7, Discussion

Despite these uncertainties, our findings point to two simple interventions that may improve idea selection: (1) asking another person to evaluate one’s ideas, and (2) reviewing one’s ideas after a substantial delay—both of which would increase selectivity. We hope that our findings will encourage further research on the Creative Endowment Effect and on the interplay between idea generation and selection.

— Creators Have Difficulty Abandoning Ideas They Generated  (2609.05115 - Kim et al., 4 Sep 2026) in Discussion, pp. 15–16