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 […]
Countering assertions that student-loan forgiveness would primarily benefit wealthy people, a new study from the Roosevelt Institute determined that "student debt cancellation would provide more benefits to those with fewer economic resources and could play a critical role in addressing the racial wealth gap and building the Black middle class." The study, titled “Student Debt […]
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 […]
Use of automatic subscriptions has exploded in recent years. Some companies make it easy to sign up but very difficult to cancel, and consumer complaints have piled up. The Washington Post reports, here, that the Federal Trade Commission is looking at ways to make it harder for companies to trap consumers in monthly subscription.
Recently, the blog posted two items (here and here) arguing that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should issue a rule barring the use of arbitration clauses unless consumers opt in to them. The second item was in reply to Mark Levin's blog post at Ballard Spahr's Consumer Finance Monitor blog response to our first blog […]