Wanted: a Bigger Stick. On Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts with Online Service Providers

The Unfair Contract Terms Directive offers consumers protection from pre-formulated imbalanced contract terms. While the standard terms and conditions of online service providers have previously been accused of harming clients of such online services, a comprehensive analysis of the potential unfair character of such terms and conditions in line with the interpretation of the Directive supplied by the CJEU has not yet been provided. This paper aims to fill in this gap in the academic literature. It identifies several types of contractual terms used by international online service providers in their consumer contracts, which are unlikely to pass the Directive’s unfairness test.     

The Protection of Lithuanian Consumers against Unfair Contract Terms

Lithuania joined the European Union in 2004. This paper presents the outcome of a research project on the protection provided to Lithuanian consumers by the legislation adopted to transpose the provisions of Directive 93/13/EEC on unfair contract terms into national law. This research was supported by the Eurofaculty of Vilnius University in May/June 2005.     

Unfair Contract Terms Under Greek Law: Case Law Developments

This note examines a decision by the Greek Supreme Court which offers an interpretation of the unfair term provision in consumer protection law. The case concerned a class action by a consumer organization against a commercial bank. The decision makes a breakthrough in two related respects. First, the Court not only interprets the national law in the light of the EU Directive on Unfair Contract Terms, but also adopts rules of interpretation and reasoning that run parallel to the latest European discussion on unfair contract terms. Second, in an unprecedented manner for Greek case law, it declares a large number of contractual clauses to be unfair, hence broadening consumer protection significantly. Most commercial banks in Greece are now under an obligation to modify their pre-formulated contracts in order to comply with the Court's interpretation of the provision on unfair terms in the Consumer Protection Act.     

Unfair Terms in Contracts: Proposals for Reform in the UK

The English and Scottish Law Commissions have made radical proposals for simplifying UK law on unfair terms in consumer contracts, combining the Regulations that implement the Directive and the earlier legislation into a single instrument that is to be written in language that would be clear and accessible to consumers and businesspeople. The article discusses some of the difficult policy choices involved in combining the different approaches of the two existing instruments, what is needed in order to make the legislation understandable to the lay person, and the extent to which the case of Commission v The Kingdom of the Netherlands requires Member States to use the language of the Directive when implementing it. The Law Commissions also proposed to extend the broader controls found in the Directive to business-to-business contracts, but the proposals did not find favour with the business community.     

Competing Online: Studying Consumer Choice Drivers for Online Financial Services

ABSTRACT

Given the rapid increase in the consumer use of online services and the increase in competition between firms that compete online, firms are faced with a crucial challenge. Having invested significant resources in transitioning consumers from using offline services to using online services, they now need to understand what drives consumers to choose between competing online services. Our study seeks an exploratory answer to the above challenge. Specifically, we consider, “what role do factors that drive consumers into using online services play in assisting firms better compete in the online space?” This paper explores the above question by quantifying the value that consumers of an online financial service place on having access to in-depth product information, an affordable online service, an easy to use online service, access to offline capabilities, and available marketing promotions. The results reported in this paper are based on a web-based discrete choice experiment in which 2,209 consumers were asked to compare various online financial service offerings, differing from each other in terms of the relative availability of our critical factors. The results demonstrate that consumer preferences (relative utilities) for various factors of an online financial service are different. Our results enable practicing managers to understand the factors that drive consumer choice when faced with competing online services. We believe that these results have both managerial and research implications for design, management and operations strategy formulation for online services.     

Unfair Consumer Contract Terms Under Macedonian Law: How the Old and the New Function in Practice

This article analyses the functioning in practice of the system of substantive regulation of unfair terms in consumer contracts, introduced into Macedonian law as part of the harmonization obligations of the EU accession process. Specifically, the article seeks to establish the possible reasons for the absence of substantial evidence of application of the rules on unfair contract terms in consumer contracts in Macedonian practice. In providing an explanation, the focus is on the transposition of the consumer acquis and the Unfair Contract Terms Directive into national law, the enforcement structure for consumer law, and the relationship with the pre-existing civil law. In sum, the inconsistencies and incompleteness of the transposition, the weak and complex enforcement structure, as well as the unsettled relationship with the already existing civil law rules on similar topics have all contributed to weaken the practical significance of the special law on unfair contract terms.     

Rocking the Boat: Loot Boxes in Online Digital Games,the Regulatory Challenge,and the EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive

Journal of Consumer Policy - The loot box, a feature of online video games, contains randomised virtual items of importance to gameplay. Comparisons are drawn between chance-based loot boxes and...     

显失公允的倾销幅度裁定过程探析

倾销幅度测算是裁定倾销以及实施反倾销措施的依据和基础。将正常价值和出口价格进行比较从而确定倾销幅度的过程,看似简单,实则复杂而繁琐。测算过程中每个阶段的不同操作,都会导致完全不同的测算结果,而不同的结果又会对出口企业的利益产生重大的影响。因此,为掌握反倾销规则以实例分析了美国在进行倾销幅度测算时的具体做法。     

When Online Visibility Deters Social Interaction: The Case of Digital Gifts

One of the defining features of online social networks is that users' actions are visible to other users. In this paper, we argue that such visibility can have a detrimental effect on users' willingness to exchange digital gifts. Gift giving is an intimate activity that comes with social risk, and the public nature of online environments can deter interactions that usually occur in smaller, more intimate settings. To study the effects of online visibility on the decision to give, we analyze a unique dataset from a large online social network that offers users the option of buying a digital gifting service. We find that purchase rates of the service increased with the number of ties that users kept on the network, but decreased with the extent to which those ties were connected to each other. We argue that the latter effect is due to the fact that, when a user's ties are connected, any gift sent between the user and one tie is visible to their mutual contacts. We explore how characteristics of users' networks moderate the effect of online visibility, and argue that firms should take consumer network structure into account when designing digital products and promoting engagement online.     

丰田,意在构建"完整的车社会"

汽车，驶进了我们的生活圈。随着汽车普及率的不断提高，如何向用户提供一个优质的、及时的服务，成了众多国际汽车商逐鹿中国汽车市场的风向标。     

The Externalisation of Producer Services Debate: The UK Computer Services Sector

This article uses a variety of evidence from the UK computer services industry to inform debates surrounding externalisation processes and the nature of growth in contemporary producer service sectors. While it has been argued that growth in such industries is predominantly demand-lead and independent from the disintegration of businesses in client sectors, in the computer services sector the direct transfer of activity from client firms to independent computer service providers is an increasingly important component of growth at an aggregate, national scale. Growth in this segment is being fuelled by the de-regulation of public sector IT procurenment in the UK.     

Exploring Communication Activities in Online Communities: A Longitudinal Analysis in the Financial Services Industry

Online communities (OCs) are seen as important stimulus to electronic business. However, surprisingly little is known about how the communication activity of their participants develops and changes over time. A longitudinal study bears the potential to better elaborate the enabling and inhibiting factors of the participant's communication activity in OCs. To explore these phenomena, we aimed to develop a conceptual framework that serves as a foundation to guide an explorative data analysis of real OCs. We use the notions of common ground, information overload, interactivity, and social loafing to explain the communication activity of the participants in OCs. The empirically explored framework will help organizations to support the development of OCs and utilize them in an economically successful way.

Based on a literature review, we developed a first conceptual framework. Then, we apply it to describe the development of the communication activity and its determinants in an OC hosted by a German financial service provider. In this study, we examined over 33,000 participants and 1.03 million messages over a period of 3 years. We found a strong effect of external factors on the size of this OC. The size of the OC showed no direct influence on the communication activity of the participants. However, in reaction to the increasing information load, communication strategies changed and herewith influenced the communication activity. The heterogeneity of the participant's activity was growing over time, and a small minority of participants wrote more and more of the postings.     

The Match between Information Control and Motivation in the Online Context

E‐commerce practitioners have long tried to leverage the technological characteristics of the Internet to facilitate better information seeking and decision making by consumers online. One impressive characteristic of the Internet is that it offers users various degrees of information control on the same medium. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of this characteristic on consumers’ decision‐making online. It is hypothesized that, to improve quality of consumers’ decisions, the degree of information control should match the degree of motivation. The rationale is that highly motivated consumers have a strong will to search for relevant information; therefore, a high degree of information control allows them to search as much as they want and thereby improve their decision making. Low‐motivation consumers, on the other hand, are unwilling to search; hence a low degree of information control, which might push high‐quality information, would benefit them. The study employed the methodology of experiment, and involved 171 voluntary participants. The empirical results show that high‐motivation consumers make better decisions when they are given a high degree of information control, compared to when they are in a low information control condition. On the other hand, low‐motivation consumers in a low information control condition perform better than similar consumers in a high‐control condition. The results strongly support the match hypothesis of information control.     

Impact of Digital Transformation on Value Creation in Fintech Services: An Innovative Approach

The aim of this article is to indicate economic and financial characteristics of financial technology, or fintech, that contribute to value creation in the financial services industry. This study presents a theory of digital transformations and elements of ecosystems theory and connecting them to fintech issues. Building from the DIPLOM model of corporate diplomacy. Corporate diplomacy. Building reputations and relationships with external stakeholders. Sheffield UK: Greenleaf Publishing Limited, this article proposes the DIPLOMA model with seven elements of fintech best practice, that are, Digital, Innovation, Pricing, Learning, Openness, Modernity, and Agility. This article stresses on practical insights to provide tool to enable stakeholders create value on fintech.     

Online Shopping Carts: The State-of-the-Art

ABSTRACT

“Shopping cart” is a term that has come to mean one of two things: first, an online ordering system that is separate from an e-commerce website, and second, a store-building system that can be used to build and manage both an e-commerce site's web pages and its ordering system. We first describe the feature typically included in all carts-an ordering system. Next, we discuss the additional features included in store-building systems. Finally, we briefly review the shopping cart market itself through an examination of the types of systems vendors were offering at the time this paper was written.