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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Northwestern Pritzker School of Law

Faculty Working Papers

Consumer protection

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Safety First? The Role Of Emotion In Safety Product Betrayal Aversion, Jonathan Koehler, Andrew D. Gershoff Jan 2011

Safety First? The Role Of Emotion In Safety Product Betrayal Aversion, Jonathan Koehler, Andrew D. Gershoff

Faculty Working Papers

Consumers often face decisions about whether to purchase products that are intended to protect them from possible harm. However, safety products rarely provide perfect protection and sometimes "betray" consumers by causing the very harm they are intended to prevent. Examples include vaccines that may cause disease and air bags that may explode with such force that they cause death. Expanding research on betrayal aversion, this study examines the role of emotions in consumers' tendency to choose safety options that provide less overall protection in order to eliminate a very small probability of harm due to safety product betrayal. In five …


Consumer Harm Acts? An Economic Analysis Of Private Actions Under State Consumer Protection Acts, Henry N. Butler, Jason S. Johnston Jan 2009

Consumer Harm Acts? An Economic Analysis Of Private Actions Under State Consumer Protection Acts, Henry N. Butler, Jason S. Johnston

Faculty Working Papers

State Consumer Protection Acts (CPAs) were adopted in the 1960s and 1970s to protect consumers from unfair and deceptive practices that would not be redressed but for the existence of the acts. In this sense, CPAs were designed to fill existing gaps in market, legal and regulatory protections of consumers. CPAs were designed to solve two simple economic problems: 1) individual consumers often do not have the incentive or means to pursue individual claims against mass marketers who engage in unfair and deceptive practices; and, 2) because of the difficulty of establishing elements of either common law fraud or breach …