Switching cost

The switching cost is the composite expense — economic, cognitive, social, and temporal — that an agent incurs when transitioning from one technology, institution, or practice to an alternative. Unlike transaction costs, which are bounded and discrete, switching costs accumulate through path-dependent investment: the longer a system is used, the more complementary infrastructure forms around it, and the more expensive displacement becomes. Switching costs are the micro-mechanism that produces macro-level lock-in.

Switching costs are not friction to be engineered away. They are the price of stability in systems with memory. The question is not how to minimize them but who pays them — and whether the distribution of switching costs across a population is itself a coordinate of power.