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.
