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Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
Keith B. Anderson of the Federal Trade Commission – Bureau of Economics has written To Whom Do Victims of Mass-Market Consumer Fraud Complain?. Here is the abstract: Utilizing data from surveys of mass-market consumer fraud sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission in 2005, 2011, and 2017, this paper explores whether victims of such mass-market consumer frauds […]
Shelly Kreiczer-Levy of Ramat Gan College of Law & Business; Global Affiliated Faculty, The Vulnerability and Human Condition Program, Emory Law School has written The Duties of Online Marketplaces 58 San Diego Law Review (2021). Here's the abstract: Is Amazon a seller for the purpose of product liability law? Is it obligated to stop price gouging by […]
Farshad Ghodoosi of the David Nazarian School of Business & Economics, California State University, Northridge and Monica Sharif of California State University, Los Angeles have written Justice in Arbitration: The Consumer Perspective, International Journal of Conflict Management (2021). Here is the abstract: Purpose: Arbitration—a binding private third-party adjudication—has been the primary legal way for resolution […]
Here (may be behind paywall). As we reported earlier, the Senate confirmed Professor Khan to be an FTC commissioner earlier today. Now that the FTC will have two democratic commissioners, besides Rohit Chopra, the expectation is that the Senate will proceed to vote on Chopra's confirmation to be the CFPB director.
Noam Kolt of the University of Toronto has written Predicting Consumer Contracts, 37 Berkeley Technology Law Journal (2022 Forthcoming). Here is the abstract: This Article empirically examines whether a computational language model can read and understand consumer contracts. Language models are able to perform a wide range of complex tasks by predicting the next word in […]
We received the following call for submissions: The AALS Section on Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services invites submissions of no more than five pages for its session at the 2022 annual meeting of the AALS. Next year’s annual meeting will be held virtually from January 5-9, 2022, with the date and time of the […]
by Jeff Sovern The report, by Syed Ejaz, is titled A Broken System: How The Credit Reporting System Fails Consumers And What To Do About It. Here are excerpts from the Executive Summary: Consumers are finding errors on their credit reports. More than one-third (34 percent) of consumers who participated in CR’s Credit Checkup survey […]
Oren Bar-Gill of Harvard and Omri Ben-Shahar of Chicago have written Manipulation by Mislaid Priorities. Here is the abstract: This paper lays a foundation for a new theory of manipulation, based on the misprioritization of (truthful) information. Since consumers review only a subset of all available information, firms can harm consumers by prioritizing information that maximizes […]
by Jeff Sovern The report is titled Where White Men Rule: How the Secretive System of Forced Arbitration Hurts Women and Minorities. CNBC has a story here. Here's an excerpt from the report: Arbitrators in consumer and employment cases are mostly male and overwhelmingly white. At AAA and JAMS, the two largest consumer and employment […]