Search Cost

Search cost is the time, energy and money expended by a consumer who is researching a product or service for purchase. Search costs include the opportunity cost of the time and energy spent on searching - time and energy that could have been devoted to other activities – and perhaps the money spent to travel between stores examining different options, purchase research data or consult an expert for purchasing advice.

Search costs tend to be higher on big-ticket items because it makes more sense to spend time, energy and possibly money researching how to get the most reliable and affordable car than it does researching how to get the tastiest and most affordable sandwich. The consequences of making a bad purchase decision on an expensive item are much greater than those for an inexpensive item.

Thanks to the internet, buyers face lower search costs for almost anything they want to buy today than they did two decades ago, because users can now get fast, accurate information on products and services without even having to leave home.

Prices for the same or similar items differ across stores and locations for a variety of reasons. The fact that the same product can be bought for the same or lower price usually provides enough incentive to conduct a search. However, if a product is purchased infrequently, the effort to check the price on every shopping trip might outweigh the benefit of spending less. Therefore, promotions and advertising for a particular product increases the consumer’s incentive to search. This change in incentives leads to an increase in category traffic, which, from a store owner's perspective, is a desirable.

Search costs are divided into external and internal costs. External costs include the monetary costs of acquiring the information and the opportunity cost of the time taken up in searching. External costs are not under the consumer's control. However, the decision to incur the costs are at the discretion of the consumer. Internal costs include the mental effort given over to undertaking the search, sorting the incoming information and applying it in context with existing knowledge. Internal costs are determined by the consumer's ability to undertake the search, and this, in turn, depends on intelligence, prior knowledge, education and training.

The Internet was expected to eliminate search costs. For example, electronic commerce was predicted to cause disintermediation as search costs become low enough for end-consumers to incur them directly instead of employing retailers to do this for them. This would, in turn, lead to lower prices and less variation between prices quoted by different sellers.