Search Engine Switching Costs

This research projects looks at the market position of search engines. Many commentators have argued that Google not only dominates the search market, but through it has a captive audience it can targets its ads to. The audience is captive it is argued because consumers switching away from Google would incur prohibitively high costs.

This multi-pronged empirical research, conducted by post-doctoral research fellows Tracy Loh and Qiu-Hong Wang as well as centre director Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, aims at getting a sense of the perceived switching costs for consumers. It is currently taking place in Singapore, but we aim to have similar experiments run on other continents and with a variety of audiences. If you are interested in collaborating please do contact Tracy Loh.