Search and switching costs are two market frictions that are well known in the literature for preventing people from switching to a new and cheaper provider. Previous experimental literature has studied these two frictions in isolation. However, field evidence shows that these two frictions frequently occur together. Recently, a theoretical framework has been developed (Wilson in Eur Econ Rev 56(6):1070–1086) which studies the interplay between these two costs. We report on an experiment testing this theory to see if individual behaviour with search and switching costs is in line with the theoretical predictions derived from the optimal choice rule of Wilson. The results show the crucial role of the search strategy: not only, according to Wilson model, the search cost has a greater deterrent impact on search than the switching costs, but also the sub-optimality of the search strategy is the major source of sub-optimality in the switching behaviour.

搜索和转换成本是两个市场摩擦，在文献中众所周知，这是防止人们转向新的，价格便宜的提供商的。先前的实验文献已经孤立地研究了这两个摩擦。但是，现场证据表明这两种摩擦经常同时发生。最近，已经开发了一个理论框架（Wilson在Eur Econ Rev 56（6）：1070-1086中），该框架研究了这两种成本之间的相互作用。我们报告了一个测试该理论的实验，以查看具有搜索和转换成本的个人行为是否与从Wilson的最佳选择规则得出的理论预测一致。结果显示了搜索策略的关键作用：不仅，根据Wilson模型，搜索成本对搜索的威慑力比转换成本更大，