Status-related consumer protection in the digital economy

Award date: 25 January 2018Supervisor: Prof. Hans-W. MicklitzThe thesis investigates the evolution of the status-related approach to consumer protection in the private law of the European Union and asks whether this traditional approach is still viable in the times of growing digitalisation. It explores, firstly, what consumer protection actually means and, secondly, whether instruments adopted for this purpose are also directed at the achievement of other policy goals. It shows that, in the most general understanding, consumer protection is linked to the position of “passive market participants”, namely persons entering into legal relationships to satisfy their needs without producing the product or service themselves. It is usually, but not invariably, limited to the standard consumer notion, displays several overarching themes such as access, information, fairness and alternative dispute resolution and remains strongly intertwined with the internal market project. The thesis further asks whether, throughout the years, tensions associated with the status-related approach to consumer protection were identified and, if so, whether and how they were addressed. It touches upon the changing normative content of the term itself and points to several areas – most notably related to the provision of services – in which the notion of a “consumer” has partially been replaced (or supplemented) with other categories. It finally asks whether digitalisation is setting an end to the status-related consumer protection and attempts to draw the possible ways forward

Overexcitability in Children Aged 8 and 9 in Parents’ Perception. Does Sex Matter?

Wzmożone pobudliwości psychiczne (OE) przejawiające się w intensywnym, emocjonalnym i głębokim przeżywaniu, są częścią potencjału rozwojowego w Teorii Dezintegracji Pozytywnej Kazimierza Dąbrowskiego. Większość badań OE prowadzona jest z osobami uzdolnionymi z wykorzystaniem samooceny. Niniejsze badanie przeprowadzono wśród dzieci losowo dobranych z ogólnoszkolnej populacji, z wyłączeniem selektywnego kryterium wybitnych zdolności. Za pomocą Overexcitability Inventory for Parents (OIP-II) zebrano opinie rodziców na temat profili OE ich dzieci. OIP-II składa się z sześciu skal: psychomotorycznej, sensualnej, wyobrażeniowej, intelektualnej OEs oraz wrażliwości emocjonalnej i empatii emocjonalnej. W badaniu wzięło udział 116 rodziców dzieci w wieku 8 lat (n=42, 26% dziewczynek) i 9 lat (n=74, 50% dziewczynek). Wielowymiarowa analiza wariancji (MANOVA) wykazała, że dziewczęta uzyskały statystycznie istotnie wyższe wyniki niż chłopcy w  sensualnej OE (p<.05) i empatii emocjonalnej (p<.01). Starsze dziewczęta uzyskiwały wyższe wyniki (p<.01) w sensualnej OE, a młodsze w empatii emocjonalnej. Nie znaleziono profilu OE chłopców. Nowością w niniejszym badaniu jest losowy dobór dzieci z ogólnej populacji oraz wykorzystanie OIP-II. W dyskusji prezentowane są możliwe wyjaśnienia i interpretacje wyników, w tym sugestie kierunku dalszych badań.Overexcitabilities (OEs) that manifest themselves in intense, emotional, and deep experiencing are part of the developmental potential in Kazimierz Dąbrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration. Most of the studies of OEs are conducted with gifted individuals, using self-evaluation. The present study was carried out among children randomly selected from a general school population, excluding the selective criterion of high abilities. With the use of the Overexcitability Inventory for Parents (OIP-II), parents’ perceptions of their children’s profiles of OEs were collected. The OIP-II consists of six scales: psychomotor, sensual, imaginational, intellectual OEs, plus emotional sensitivity and emotional empathy. The participants were 116 parents of children aged 8 (13 girls, 29 boys) and 9 (37 girls, 37 boys) from Poland. The multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed that girls scored statistically significantly higher than boys on sensual OE and emotional empathy. Older girls obtained higher scores on sensual OE and younger on emotional empathy. No OE profile of boys was found. The novelty in the present study is a random selection of children from a general population for the study as well as the use of the OIP-II. In the discussion, possible explanations and interpretations of the findings are presented, including a suggestion for the direction of further research

AI in search of unfairness in consumer contracts : the terms of service landscape

Published online: 18 July 2022This article explores the potential of artificial intelligence for identifying cases where digital vendors fail to comply with legal obligations, an endeavour that can generate insights about business practices. While heated regulatory debates about online platforms and AI are currently ongoing, we can look to existing horizontal norms, especially concerning the fairness of standard terms, which can serve as a benchmark against which to assess business-to-consumer practices in light of European Union law. We argue that such an assessment can to a certain extent be automated; we thus present an AI system for the automatic detection of unfair terms in business-to-consumer contracts, a system developed as part of the CLAUDETTE project. On the basis of the dataset prepared in this project, we lay out the landscape of contract terms used in different digital consumer markets and theorize their categories, with a focus on five categories of clauses concerning (i) the limitation of liability, (ii) unilateral changes to the contract and/or service, (iii) unilateral termination of the contract, (iv) content removal, and (v) arbitration. In so doing, the paper provides empirical support for the broader claim that AI systems for the automated analysis of textual documents can offer valuable insights into the practices of online vendors and can also provide valuable help in their legal qualification. We argue that the role of technology in protecting consumers in the digital economy is critical and not sufficiently reflected in EU legislative debates.Francesca Lagioia has been supported by the European Research Council (ERC) Project “CompuLaw” (Grant Agreement No 833647) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and by the SCUDO project, within the POR-FESR 2014-2020 programme of Regione Toscana. Agnieszka Jabłonowska has been supported by the National Science Center in Poland (Grant Agreement UMO-2019/35/B/HS5/04444). This work has been supported by the Claudette (CLAUseDETecTEr) project, funded by the Research Council of the European University Institute and from the Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs (BEUC)

Assessing the cross-market generalization capability of the CLAUDETTE system

We present a study aimed at testing the CLAUDETTE system’s ability to generalise the concept of unfairness in consumer contracts across diverse market sectors. The data set includes 142 terms of services grouped in five sub-sets: travel and accommodation, games and entertainment, finance and payments, health and well-being, and the more general others. Preliminary results show that the classifier has satisfying performance on all the sectors.Francesca Lagioia and Giovanni Sartor have been supported by the H2020 ERC Project “CompuLaw” (G.A. 833647). Marco Lippi has been supported by the SCUDO project, within the POR-FESR 2014-2020 programme of Regione Toscana. Giacomo Tagiuri has been supported by the National Science Centre in Poland (G.A. UMO- 2019/35/B/HS5/04444)

A corpus for multilingual analysis of online terms of service

We present the first annotated corpus for multilingual analysis of potentially unfair clauses in online Terms of Service. The data set comprises a total of 100 contracts, obtained from 25 documents annotated in four different languages: English, German, Italian, and Polish. For each contract, potentially unfair clauses for the consumer are annotated, for nine different unfairness categories. We show how a simple yet efficient annotation projection technique based on sentence embeddings could be used to automatically transfer annotations across languages

Ochrona konsumentów wobec transformacji sektora podróży w dobie platform internetowych: wnioski dla rozwoju prawa Unii Europejskiej

Rozprawa doktorska poświęcona jest wyzwaniom dla prawa i polityki konsumenckiej w Unii Europejskiej, wynikającym z rosnącej roli platform internetowych i ich wpływu na sektor podróży, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem tzw. gospodarki współpracy (ang. collaborative economy). Biorąc pod uwagę, z jednej strony, wieloletnie zaangażowanie prawodawcy UE w regulację sektora podróży, z drugiej zaś - tempo obecnie zachodzących zmian w praktyce rynkowej, pojawia się pytanie, czy istniejące normy prawne zachowują aktualność. Rozprawa doktorska podejmuje tę problematykę z perspektywy ochrony konsumentów, rozumianej szeroko jako ochrona biernych uczestników rynku. Zgodnie z przyjętą w pracy koncepcją "otoczenia regulacyjnego" (ang. regulatory environment), w badaniach uwzględniono zarówno obowiązujące normy prawne, jak i instrumenty ochrony konsumentów stosowane dobrowolnie przez operatorów platform internetowych. Podstawowe pytanie badawcze rozważane w rozprawie dotyczy zasadności podjęcia na poziomie Unii Europejskiej działań mających na celu podniesienie poziomu ochrony konsumentów zawierających, przy pomocy platform internetowych, umowy dotyczące pojedynczych usług najmu turystycznego lub przewozu osób, lub dążących do ich zawarcia. Celem rozprawy jest ponadto wyznaczenie kierunku możliwych działań, w razie pozytywnej odpowiedzi na wskazane pytanie badawcze.Narodowe Centrum Nauki - konkurs PRELUDIUM 10 - projekt "Ochrona konsumentów w gospodarce współpracy (ang. collaborative economy) - analiza prawnoporównawcza" (2015/19/N/HS5/01557); Narodowe Centrum Nauki - konkurs ETIUDA 6 - projekt "Koncepcja otoczenia regulacyjnego a stosunki prawne nawiązywane w gospodarce współpracy" (2018/28/T/HS5/00142