Who owns new creations? Initiation weighs more than completion

People contribute to new creations through different tasks, skill and effort. How do these contributions influence judgements of ownership? Past research has shown that initial effort towards a goal and net labour contribution are both relevant to intuitions about rightful ownership. However, their relative weights remain unclear, and hence often have different implications about who the owner should be. Here, we examine ownership judgements of new creations, contrasting different contributions. Across four online experiments (total N=704), we describe an initiator and a completer who work together on the creation of a new object, with their contributions varying in terms of effort, skill and how much they meet the original goal. We find an especially strong preference for the initiator to take ownership. This may be because initiation seems more necessary: without it, the subsequent steps of creation would not be needed.