The emergence of the Internet as a commercialization method has offered organizations many opportunities. However, when buyers want to execute a transaction online, a certain distrust typically accompanies the need to provide personal data. To address this problem, assurance seals have been...

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...

Finanzdienstleistungen werden im Regelfall zwischen Parteien mit einem ungleichen Status abgeschlossen. Diese Ungleichheit resultiert aus der Informationsasymmetrie und der Entscheidungshoheit über die angebotene Produktpalette. Dies beschränkt die Verhandlungsmacht auf Seiten der...

Mobile money is an innovation that allows financial transactions to be performed via a cell phone. Even in poor regions of Africa, almost everyone has a cell phone; therefore, mobile money could both contribute to the continent’s economic growth and ensure that no Africans are excluded from...

The rise of the sharing economy has generated great regulatory challenges. The European Union (EU) has to perform a fine balancing act. On the one hand, it has to safeguard weaker parties, consumers and workers, ensuring they enjoy fair treatment by adopting proper regulatory responses. On the...

The regulation of microfinance services is likely to have a wide-ranging influence on the microfinance sector, particularly on institutions and their clients. This paper reveals the impact of a specific regulatory regime, the "Microcredit Regulatory Authority Act, 2006", enacted by the...

We model firms' quality disclosure and pricing in the presence of cursed consumers, who fail to be sufficiently skeptical about undisclosed quality. We show that cursed consumers are exploited in duopoly markets if firms are vertically differentiated, if there are few cursed consumers, and if...

Advertisements can be factual, sometimes annoying and occasionally funny. In a competitive world they are all jostling for our attention. Since an advertisement has the potential to persuade people into commercial transactions that they might otherwise avoid, the information provided in an...

The Israeli Supervisor of Banks is in charge of two regulatory goals: Maintaining the stability of the banking system ("prudential regulation") and consumer protection. On the face of it, these two goals are consistent and complete each other. However, in certain situations they may conflict,...

This study seeks to analyze the effects of over the top service model regulation of the Nigerian Communications Commission on consumers’ protection in North-Western Nigeria by finding out what extent would be licensing OTT service providers impact consumers’ data protection and privacy, and...

Online commerce has grown but consumer law has not kept pace. In the United States, legal protections have become inadequate in light of the realities of common cross-border transacting practices as facilitated by the internet. Technologies have empowered merchants to outpace consumers, their...

This paper shows that the provision of consumer rights can decrease welfare when some consumers remain ignorant of these rights. We find that consumers uninformed about a mandated warranty demand excessively safe products in some circumstances. In other circumstances, uninformed consumers buy...

The Discussion Paper, intended to guide the ACCC toward the recommendations in the ongoing Digital Platform Services Inquiry, suggests consideration of a wide variety of sweeping changes in Australian competition-law enforcement and the enactment of additional regulations in regard to social...

This note provides: (1) an overview of new manifestations of consumer risks that are significant and cross-cutting across four key fintech products: digital microcredit, P2PL, investment-based crowdfunding, and e-money; and (2) examples of emerging regulatory approaches to target such risks....

We present results from a first ever representative phone survey that measures consumer grievances in Indian retail financial markets. We find that for every com- plaint on banking and payments that makes it to the regulatory system, there are 60 grievances that do not get voiced. In insurance...

This study aims to analyze the juridical review of consumer protection from the perspective of the Job Creation Act and how the effectiveness of existing dispute resolutions resolves these problems. Technological developments change the order of values and human life, one of which is economic...

Data protection law has been one of the intensely discussed legal domains in relation to new data technologies such as Big Data and Machine Learning. Arguments have even been made that due to its wide scope (both material and personal), it may apply to everything and everyone. However, criticism...

The Federal Trade Commission’s initiative to use rulemaking powers to target “unfair methods of competition” under the FTC Act is part of a broader package of dramatic recent changes in antitrust enforcement policy and practice by FTC leadership. These changes, which have rejected the...

The EU has had a significant impact on the regulation of private relationships between traders and consumers, but this has been without differentiating between those situations which involve a cross-border element, and those which are purely domestic. This paper queries whether this ‘one size...

On October 25, 2021, in a 3-to-2 vote, strictly along party lines, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) announced a major policy shift in how the agency will review and settle mergers. Going forward, all parties who agree to a merger remedy order, including a divestiture, must also agree...

The most fundamental challenge in consumer protection law lies in the information asymmetry that exists between merchants and consumers. Merchants typically know far more about their products and services than consumers do, and this imbalance threatens the fairness of consumer contracts.However,...

This paper seeks to ascertain the influence of financial literacy and financial consumer protection on digital financial access. The objectives of the study were to find out the effect of financial literacy on digital monetary access, and to find out the effect of f consumer financial protection...

Identifying whether hyperbolic advertising claims influence consumers is important for consumer protection, but differentiating mere "puffery" from misleading advertising is not straightforward. We conducted a pre-registered experiment to determine whether pseudo-technical advertising claims...

We show that financial advisors recommend more costly products to female clients, based on minutes from about 27,000 real-world advisory meetings and client portfolio data. Funds recom-mended to women have higher expense ratios controlling for risk, and women less often receive rebates on...

The emergence of the Internet as a commercialization method has offered organizations many opportunities. However, when buyers want to execute a transaction online, a certain distrust typically accompanies the need to provide personal data. To address this problem, assurance seals have been...

While data-driven personalisation strategies in marketing offer consumers several benefits, they potentially also create new disparities and vulnerabilities in society, and in individuals. This article explores in what ways application of so-called personalised marketing communication may lead...

Journalists, non-profits and consumer organisations, as well as the authors' first-hand review of relevant privacy policies reveal that fertility and menstruation tracking apps (FMTs) collect and share an excessive array of data. Through doctrinal legal research, we evaluate this data processing...

We show that financial advisors recommend more costly products to female clients, based on minutes from about 27,000 real-world advisory meetings and client portfolio data. Funds recommended to women have higher expense ratios controlling for risk, and women less often receive rebates on upfront...

The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention & Consumer Protection Act (“BAPCPA”), enacted in 2005, overhauled the Bankruptcy Code with the goal of reducing serial filers’ abuse of the bankruptcy system and to increase fairness to both debtors and creditors. However, debates in Congress did not focus...

The introduction of a comprehensive competition regime in a developing country comes with a lot of expectations, due to the idea and belief that it will help in fighting harmful practices in the economy and also be a panacea to economic development. However, this is not always the case because...

‘Open Banking’ is a digital finance innovation built upon customer data sharing between incumbent financial institutions and third party financial service providers. Open Banking is reshaping the banking sector through extending the reach and convenience of traditional banking services by...

This article examines why and how a regulation on retail banking fees, commissions, and charges emerged in Turkey after a long period of regulatory forbearance. The article shows that when regulatory forbearance caused stasis, and the “statist”, exclusionary policymaking context limited...

This article studies optimal remedies in a setting in which damages vary among plaintiffs and are difficult to determine. We show that giving plaintiffs a choice between cash and coupons to purchase units of the defendant's product at a discount -- a "coupon-cash remedy" -- is superior to cash...

We show that financial advisors recommend more costly products to female clients, based on minutes from about 27,000 real-world advisory meetings and client portfolio data. Funds recom-mended to women have higher expense ratios controlling for risk, and women less often receive rebates on...