The rapid growth of electronic commerce increases the potential for conflicts over contracts which have been entered into online (e.g. about price, late delivery, defects, specifications ...). Thus, the use of online dispute resolution (ODR) mechanisms to resolve such e-commerce conflicts is...

ODR systems can be considered to be a very specific kind of Web services, requiring the support of new types of communication adapted to dispute resolution processes (negotiation, mediation, and arbitration) and corresponding to security mechanisms such as integrity and confidentiality of data....

This article seeks to examine the fertility, for the regulation of cyberspace, of the "pyramid-network hypothesis". This hypothesis is the conjecture that the process of how law is being created, generally, in all fields of the law, is undergoing a paradigm shift. It is moving away from a...

Online dispute resolution systems can be effective in a way that courts, mostly, cannot, because they operate on much smaller costs. When connected to self-enforcement mechanisms, ODR systems could create a global law without a state, a whole new, independent and transnational legal order: the...

In cyberspace, parties meet that would often not have met in the offline world, because they physically live in far-away countries or on different continents. Outside cyberspace, ordinary consumers do usually not enter international agreements. In cyberspace, they engage in small or medium...

The use of information technology modifies several aspects of complaints handling systems and dispute resolution mechanisms. The present article reviews some of these modifications by focusing on two specific aspects: complaint filing processes and online dispute resolution systems. The...