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A Psychological Account Of Consent To Fine Print, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
A Psychological Account Of Consent To Fine Print, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
All Faculty Scholarship
The moral and social norms that bear on contracts of adhesion suggest a deep ambivalence. Contracts are perceived as serious moral obligations, and yet they must be taken lightly or everyday commerce would be impossible. Most people see consent to boilerplate as less meaningful than consent to negotiated terms, but they nonetheless would hold consumers strictly liable for both. This Essay aims to unpack the beliefs, preferences, assumptions, and biases that constitute our assessments of assent to boilerplate. Research suggests that misgivings about procedural defects in consumer contracting weigh heavily on judgments of contract formation, but play almost no role …
Some Challenges Facing A Behaviorally-Informed Approach To The Directive On Unfair Commercial Practices, Avishalom Tor
Some Challenges Facing A Behaviorally-Informed Approach To The Directive On Unfair Commercial Practices, Avishalom Tor
Book Chapters
The Directive on Unfair Commercial Practices seeks to protect consumers by prohibiting, inter alia, misleading practices, which are defined as practices that are likely to mislead the average consumer and thereby likely to cause him to take a transactional decision he would not have taken otherwise (Directive 2005/29/ EC of the European Parliament and of the Council). While determinations of what constitutes average consumer behavior, what misleads consumers, or how consumers make transactional decisions all can be made as a matter of law, based on anecdotal observations, intuitions or theoretical assumptions, an empirical behavioral foundation can put consumer law on …
Safety First? The Role Of Emotion In Safety Product Betrayal Aversion, Jonathan Koehler, Andrew D. Gershoff
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 …