Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Protecting Low-Income Consumers In The Era Of Digital Grocery Shopping: Implications For Wic Online Ordering, Qi Zhang, Priyanka Patel, Caitlin M. Lowery

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is now expected to allow participants to redeem their food benefits online, i.e., via online ordering, rather than only in-store. However, it is unclear how this new benefit redemption model may impact participants’ welfare since vendors may have an asymmetric information advantage compared with WIC customers. The WIC online ordering environment may also change the landscape for WIC vendors, which will eventually affect WIC participants. To protect WIC consumers’ rights in the new online ordering model, policymakers need an appropriate legal and regulatory framework. This narrative review provides that …

Gamestop And The Reemergence Of The Retail Investor, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

The GameStop trading frenzy in January 2021 was perhaps the highest profile example of the reemergence of capital market participation by retail investors, a marked shift from the growing domination of those markets by large institutional investors. Some commentators have greeted retail investing, which has been fueled by app-based brokerage accounts and social media, with alarm and called for regulatory reform. The goals of such reforms are twofold. First, critics argue that retail investors need greater protection from the risks of investing in the stock market. Second, they argue that the stock market, in term, needs protection from retail investors. …

Regional Mapping: Digital Provisions Play A Key Role In Asia Pacific Agreements, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

IT HAS become more commonplace for trade agreements in the Asia Pacific to include a variety of digital trade provisions. To understand the salient features of these agreements, it is helpful to map out their main baseline features. Doing so also indicates where digital trade agreements may be going or need to go. This mapping covers all free trade agreements (FTAs) with chapters on e-commerce or digital trade since 2000 by the main players in the region-China, South Korea, Japan, India, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia.

How Does The Elimination Of State Aid To For-Profit Colleges Affect Enrollment? Evidence From California’S Reforms, Oded Gurantz, Ryan Sakoda, Shayak Sarkar

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper examines how financial aid reform based on postsecondary institutional performance impacts student choice. Federal and state regulations often reflect concerns about the private, for-profit sector’s poor employment outcomes and high loan defaults, despite the sector’s possible theoretical advantages. We use student-level data to examine how eliminating public subsidies to attend low-performing for-profit institutions impacts students’ college enrollment and completion behavior. Beginning in 2011, California tightened eligibility standards for their state aid program, effectively eliminating most for-profit eligibility. Linking data on aid application to administrative payment and postsecondary enrollment records, this paper utilizes a difference-in differences strategy to investigate …

How Does The Elimination Of State Aid To For-Profit Colleges Affect Enrollment?: Evidence From California’S Reforms, Oded Gurantz, Ryan Sakoda, Shayak Sarkar

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.

What’S In Your Wallet (And What Should The Law Do About It?), Natasha Sarin

All Faculty Scholarship

In traditional markets, firms can charge prices that are significantly elevated relative to their costs only if there is a market failure. However, this is not true in a two-sided market (like Amazon, Uber, and Mastercard), where firms often subsidize one side of the market and generate revenue from the other. This means consideration of one side of the market in isolation is problematic. The Court embraced this view in Ohio v. American Express, requiring that anticompetitive harm on one side of a two-sided market be weighed against benefits on the other side.

Legal scholars denounce this decision, which, …

Occupational Licensing And The Limits Of Public Choice Theory, Gabriel Scheffler, Ryan Nunn

All Faculty Scholarship

Public choice theory has long been the dominant lens through which economists and other scholars have viewed occupational licensing. According to the public choice account, practitioners favor licensing because they want to reduce competition and drive up their own wages. This essay argues that the public choice account has been overstated, and that it ironically has served to distract from some of the most important harms of licensing, as well as from potential solutions. We emphasize three specific drawbacks of this account. First, it is more dismissive of legitimate threats to public health and safety than the research warrants. Second, …

Making Consumer Finance Work, Natasha Sarin

All Faculty Scholarship

The financial crisis exposed major faultlines in banking and financial markets more broadly. Policymakers responded with far-reaching regulation that created a new agency—the CFPB—and changed the structure and function of these markets.

Consumer advocates cheered reforms as welfare-enhancing, while the financial sector declared that consumers would be harmed by interventions. With a decade of data now available, this Article presents the first empirical examination of the successes and failures of the consumer finance reform agenda. Specifically, I marshal data from every zip code and bank in the United States to test the efficacy of three of the most significant post-crisis …

Online Dispute Resolution, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

This chapter was prepared from a presentation given by the author at the 2019 Summer School in Transnational Commercial Law & Technology, jointly sponsored by the University of Verona School of Law and the Center for International Legal Education (CILE) of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. In the paper, I review online dispute resolution (ODR) by considering the following five questions, which I believe help to develop a better understanding of both the concept and the legal framework surrounding it:

A. What is ODR?

B. Who does ODR?

C. What is the legal framework for ODR?

D. What …

Singapore Approach To Develop And Regulate Fintech, Sai Fan Pei

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper starts with a brief introduction of the recent organizational support established by The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to promote the fast developing FinTech (financial technology) sector. Basing on its existing “balanced” approach in promoting financial development and ensuring a safe and sound financial sector, and in sync with its objective to harness technology to improve the efficiency of the financial markets, the paper elaborates on the insights of MAS' policy intent in regulating the FinTech sector. The paper then focuses on MAS' proposed “Regulatory Sandbox” – an innovative regulatory framework which helps to strike a good balance …

The 2016 Amendments To Singapore’S Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act: A Missed Opportunity, Wee Ling Loo, Ee-Ing Ong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Singapore hasrecently amended its Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act in response to calls for tougher action against unscrupulous traders. The revisions were aimed at strengthening the government’s ability to deter and punish errant traders, witha focus on deterrence. To this end, the government introduced new investigatory powers, enhanced court powers and added one substantive consumer remedy. Despite this, the authors argue that Singapore’s consumer protection regime remains inadequate because: unfair practices have yet to attract criminalsanctions; no guidelines were issued to provide transparency and clarity on how the broad investigatory powers and harsher court powers are to be implemented; no …

Protecting One's Own Privacy In A Big Data Economy, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

Big Data is the vast quantities of information amenable to large-scale collection, storage, and analysis. Using such data, companies and researchers can deploy complex algorithms and artificial intelligence technologies to reveal otherwise unascertained patterns, links, behaviors, trends, identities, and practical knowledge. The information that comprises Big Data arises from government and business practices, consumer transactions, and the digital applications sometimes referred to as the “Internet of Things.” Individuals invisibly contribute to Big Data whenever they live digital lifestyles or otherwise participate in the digital economy, such as when they shop with a credit card, get treated at a hospital, apply …

The Alabama Way: Independent Courts And Policymaking In Alabama, Ian Drake

Department of Political Science and Law Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Rather, it was the product of a conscious policy choice by early nineteenth century jurists to "overthrow" an equitable theory of contract, wherein a good was thought to have an objective value, which courts could determine, independent of the value placed on it by the parties to the contract. [...] historians like Horwitz have interpreted the "buyer beware" rule as a "procommercial [sic] attack"-a conscious judicial policy choice to favor sellers over buyers-upon communal values, which essentially separated law from morals and created a harsher, more speculative, more individualistic, and combative marketplace

Consumer Protection And Cybersecurity: The Consumer Education Gap, David Serabian

Brookings Mountain West Publications

Consumer cyber protection as it relates to the threat of cyber insecurity is an increasingly critical issue with cyberattacks on major businesses such as Target and Sony. Over 100 million Americans to date have had their financial information compromised, and in the ten-year history of Verizon’s Payment Card Industry investigations no companies were compliant with Payment Card Industry standards at the time of the attack. In March 2015, the FCC fined AT&T $25 million for failing to adequately provide cybersecurity that resulted in almost 300,000 people having their personal and financial information compromised. It was the largest in FCC history …

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 …

Consumer Credit: Too Much Or Too Little (Or Just Right)?, Jonathan Zinman

Dartmouth Scholarship

The intersection of research and policy on consumer credit often has a Goldilocks feel. Some researchers and policy makers posit that consumer credit markets produce too much credit. Other researchers and policy makers posit that markets produce too little credit. I review theories and evidence on inefficient consumer credit supply. For each of eight classes of theories I sketch some of the leading models and summarize any convincing empirical tests of those models. I also discuss more circumstantial evidence that does not map tightly onto a particular model but has the potential to shed light on, or obscure, answers to …

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 …

Striking The Right Balance: Investor And Consumer Protection In The New Financial Marketplace: Introduction, Lisa Fairfax, Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr

All Faculty Scholarship

On March 2, 2012, The George Washington University Law School's Center for Law, Economics & Finance and The George Washington Law Review jointly hosted a symposium entitled "Striking the Right Balance: Investor and Consumer Protection in the New Financial Marketplace."' The symposium focused on two principal topics. First, participants analyzed the impact of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act ("Dodd-Frank") on investors and consumers in three areas of federal regulation-securities markets, derivatives markets, and consumer financial products. Second, the symposium evaluated the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 ("Sarbanes-Oxley") on its tenth anniversary and considered whether Sarbanes-Oxley's legacy might …

Implementing Dodd-Frank: A Review Of The Cftc‟S Rulemaking Process: Testimony, Michael Greenberger

Congressional Testimony

The Relationship of Unregulated OTC Derivatives to the Meltdown. It is now accepted wisdom that it was the non-transparent, poorly capitalized, and almost wholly unregulated over-the-counter (“OTC”) derivatives market that lit the fuse that exploded the highly vulnerable worldwide economy in the fall of 2008. Because tens of trillions of dollars of these financial products were pegged to the economic performance of an overheated and highly inflated housing market, the sudden collapse of that market triggered under-capitalized or non-capitalized OTC derivative guarantees of the subprime housing investments. Moreover, the many undercapitalized insurers of that collapsing market had other multi-trillion dollar …

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 …

The Rome I Regulation Rules On Party Autonomy For Choice Of Law: A U.S. Perspective, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

This chapter was presented at a conference in Dublin on the (then) new Rome I Regulation of the European Union in the fall of 2009. It contrasts the Rome I rules on party autonomy with those in the United States. In particular, it considers the rules in the Rome I Regulation that ostensibly protect consumers by discouraging party agreement on a pre-dispute basis to the law governing a consumer contract. These rules are compared with the absence of private international law restrictions on choice of forum and choice of law in the United States, even in consumer contracts. The result …

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 …