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Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
Andrew Cheyne, Pamela Mejia, Laura Nixon, and Lori Dorfman, all of the Berkeley Media Studies Group, have written Food and Beverage Marketing to Youth, Current Obesity Reports, September 2014. Here's the abstract: After nearly a decade of concern over the role of food and beverage marketing to youth in the childhood obesity epidemic, American children […]
Ronald J. Mann of Columbia has written Do Defaults on Payday Loans Matter? Here's the abstract: This essay examines the effect on a borrower’s financial health of failure to repay a payday loan. Recent regulatory initiatives suggest an inclination to add an “ability to pay” requirement to payday-loan underwriting that would be fundamentally inconsistent with […]
by Jeff Sovern Some arbitration clauses provide that consumers can opt out of arbitration if the consumer writes to the company within a certain period of time of entering into the agreement, typically 30-60 days after opening the account. In our arbitration study, we observed that we didn't know how many consumers had taken advantage […]
by Jeff Sovern So MSNBC reports here. Here's a quote: Tillis replied: “I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of [the hand-washing] policy as long as they post a sign that says ‘We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom.’” Instead, Tillis believes that […]
by Jeff Sovern RTO kiosks are, as far as I know, a new way to buy/rent goods. In the past, stores specialized in rent-to-own financing/renting, where consumers could agree to rent an item and make payments (typically weekly) for the item until they had purchased it, or alternatively chose to surrender it. RTO businesses, unregulated by Truth […]
by Jeff Sovern In their book, More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure, Omri Ben-Shahar & Carl E. Schneider mention the "Spanish Requirement," a rule that obliged sixteenth century Spaniards to deliver a speech in Spanish demanding surrender from New World audiences that did not understand Spanish. My research assistant, Eric Levine, dug […]
by Peter Holland In anticipation of the CFPB’s forthcoming study on forced arbitration in consumer contracts, we can expect lots of rhetoric from industry about how arbitration is more consumer friendly than litigation, and that it results in better outcomes (i.e. more money) for consumers. (If this were really so, then how could a company […]
George Washington is having what looks like a terrific Consumer Protection Conference under the auspices of the ABA Antitrust Section on February 12. More information available here. Among the panels is a debate between my co-author Dee Pridgen and Howard Beales on advertising substantiation. As for how timely that is, see Steve Gardner's post on […]