Prices often react stronger to rising than to falling costs. This asymmetric cost pass-through is still not fully understood, but recent theories suggest that asymmetric adjustments of consumers’ search efforts to rising and to falling prices may be one explanation for this pattern. I use novel panel data to investigate the interaction of consumer search intensity, pricing and cost pass-through of residential electricity tariffs on online price comparison sites. I find that consumers search slightly more when prices rise but drastically decrease search efforts when they fall. Moreover, I find direct evidence that cost pass-through heavily depends on consumers’ search efforts in that cost increases are passed-through less to the consumer when search intensity is high while cost decreases are passed-through more when search intensity is high. This finding may help upstream firms to better understand how their price changes will translate into retail price adjustments.

价格对价格上涨的反应往往比对成本下降的反应要强。这种不对称的成本传递方式仍未被完全理解，但是最近的理论表明，消费者对搜索价格上涨和下降的搜索努力的不对称调整可能是这种模式的一种解释。我使用新颖的面板数据来调查在线价格比较网站上的消费者搜索强度，价格和住宅电价的成本传递的相互作用。我发现，当价格上涨时，消费者的搜索量会略多一些，但是当价格下降时，其搜索量会大大减少。此外，我发现直接证据表明，成本传递在很大程度上取决于消费者的搜索努力，因为当搜索强度较高时，成本增加较少地传递给消费者，而当搜索强度较高时，成本减少更多地传递给消费者。