• Journal of Arbitration Studies
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.3-35
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• 2017

For recent years, several disputes between Korean consumers and multinational companies have arisen. Since the disputes were big and material that children's safety was at issue, a question started if Korean law properly has protected consumers' rights against multinational companies. While the Korean legal society tried to legislate punitive compensation with this concern, the U.S. Supreme Court reached an interesting case law regarding consumer contracts. A recent trend on consumer contracts in the United States shows that general terms have arbitration clause with class action waiver. As much as international arbitration has worked as the most effective resolution in international commercial disputes, the concept is still foreign and the experts are not approachable to lay individual consumers. However, class action in arbitration can hugely help for lay individual consumers to bring a case before arbitration tribunal. California courts consistently showed the analysis that the practical impact of prohibiting class action in arbitration clause is to ban lay individual consumers from fighting for their rights. However, the Supreme Court held that the arbitration clause shall be enforced as parties agree even if consumers practically cannot fight for their rights in the end. Even though consumer contracts are a typical example of lack of parity and of adhesive contract, the Supreme Court still applies liberalism that parties are equal in power and free to agree. This case law has a crucial implication since Korean consumers buy goods and services from the U.S. and other countries in everyday life. Accordingly, they are deemed to agree on the dispute resolution clauses, which might violate their constitutional right to bring their cases before the adjudication tribunal. This issue could be more important than adopting punitive compensation because consumers' rights are not necessarily governed by Korean law but by the governing law of the general terms and conditions chosen and written by the multinational companies. Thus this paper studies and analyzes the practical reality of international arbitration and influence of arbitration clause with class action waiver with the U.S. Supreme Court and California case laws.

• Journal of Arbitration Studies
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.151-171
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• 2010

This paper investigates the consumer arbitration practices In the U.S. The key issue in consumer arbitration is how to protect the individual consumers from the loss of their legal rights stemming from the arbitration agreement with the business. In the U.S., the major legal doctrines to protect individual consumer include the voluntary-knowing-intelligent doctrine, unconscionability doctrine, and void contract. Even though the US courts are favorable to the enforceability of arbitration agreement, they strictly apply the contract law theories in deciding the existence of arbitration agreement, providing a strong common law protection for the consumers in arbitration. However, the practices for protection of consumers in arbitration in Korea are not mature yet. If consumer arbitration is widely adopted into B to C contracts, a protective measure for individual consumer can be found in the Act of Clause Regulation providing that the business has duty to explain the relevant clause in the adhesive contracts.

• Journal of Arbitration Studies
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.73-86
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• 2011

Today's arbitrations see themselves as the most effective scheme for dispute resolution in a variety of transactional context. While some kind of ADR system was already introduced in Korea as of 2007 with revision of the Consumer Basic Law, consumers' needs in dispute resolution remain unmet. Recently one consumer arbitration case divides the U.S. Supreme Court. Of course, the result of the case is expected to affect tens of millions of arbitration agreements in the States which has the most developed scheme in consumer arbitrations. While Arbitration clauses in adhesion contracts are not automatically held to be substantively unconscionable, Class action waivers are one of the most controversial issues in consumer arbitration. In this study, with the theoretical background of consumer arbitrations general, and contractual defenses against adhesive contracts, reviewed are U.S. federal courts' attitudes toward certain consumer arbitration agreements including the class arbitration waiver. Moreover, several issues in AT&T case are examined for practical implications for consumer dispute resolution. All of these are expected to initiate further research to find some guidelines for the proper status and operation of consumer arbitration here in Korea.

• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.42 no.12 s.202
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• pp.123-140
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• 2004

The purpose of this study was to explore the unfairness of adhesion contracts for internet contents service. The internet contents were classified into six types of avatar, learning, download, e-book and movie internet sites. The adhesion contracts of internet contents service were collected in 60 internet sites. The unfairness of the adhesion contract was reviewed under the adhesion contract regulation act. The major results were as follows. First, the obligation of clear statement, explanation, and delivery was not observed completely. Second, many articles of adhesion contract were unfair and they especially violated articles 7 and 9. Therefore, the standard adhesion contract system for internet content service should be enforced and self-regulation of information service providers is needed.

• Journal of Arbitration Studies
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.47-69
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• 2012

This paper investigates the U.S. courts'attitudes toward the legal doctrine of adhesion contracts, which have been employed as contract defenses by individual consumers who have entered into consumer arbitration agreements with businesses. Some requirements have been added to the sole adhesiveness of the arbitration clause that can invalidate the arbitration clause, including unconscionability and unreasonable harshness. It seems that the U.S. courts have moved toward a more tightened stance in evaluating the validity of consumer arbitration clauses, favoring consumer arbitration.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.527-542
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• 2021

The government-driven open data policies are on the rise to protect consumers from misunderstandings and monitor the companies. However, in contract-based industries such as insurance, the contract-inherent characteristics make information asymmetry between consumers and companies. Our paper focuses on insurance contracts where the contingency has high uncertainty of occurrence, and the clauses may incur high costs of reading. Given those contracts, we hypothesized that the contract's clear statement decreases customer dissatisfaction and lowers the number of complaints. To empirically support the claim, we collected customers' complaint documents of insurance companies and insurance contracts from 2005 until 2017. Our econometric models showed that clearer statements and words significantly reduce the complaints after controlling for firm-specific heterogeneity and time-specific heterogeneity. We identify that insurance companies' complaint ratio significantly differ depending on the insurance contract, including specific clauses and words.

• Journal of Arbitration Studies
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.91-110
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• 2018

Consumers repeatedly make small sum purchases through business-to-consumer contracts, usually without incident. Consumer areas have been increasing; therefore, consumer disputes have been occurring frequently as well. In international consumer transactions, it is not easy to solve consumer disputes by applying the laws of different countries. Resolving disputes by using the consumer arbitration system can be a measure to protect consumers. In the U.S., a class arbitration is being operated as a mixed dispute resolution system of class action and arbitration. Consumer Arbitration has long been a controversial issue in the U.S. It is therefore a lesson for us to examine related cases. A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, DIRECTV v. Imburgia, was looked into and after a summary of the facts, issues, and opinions and opposing opinions that had a tight controversy, a close analysis was done. The analysis through this judgment is as follows: first, the contraction of consumer protection; second, the expansion of the Federal Arbitration Act scope; third, the class arbitration's restriction; and fourth, the submission of the arbitration fairness act.

• Journal of Family Resource Management and Policy Review
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.1-26
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• 2006

The study was the second part of the research on development of consumer education program as social education program. The purpose of this study was to analyze needs fur program contents. Program contents had two parts: educational program contents and program managements. The data used contained 617 married women living in Seoul, Korea. Using SAS-PC program, Chi-square and Anova Analyses were executed. The results showed that married women had higher educational needs on housing purchase, tax avoidance, cancellation of contracts after purchase, consumer redress, etc. The differences in age, education, householder's occupation, and household income level resulted in the differences in educational needs for some specific educational items. They were likely to be educated at the highly accessible place such as women's center, community center, University extension service center, and consumer organization, etc. Also they preferred to be educated once a week fur a short time period like one to three months, and to have the lectures with discussion in the class. Some implications were mentioned for developing consumer education program as social education.

• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.89-106
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• 1998

Standard contsacts are drafted by one side only and therefore naturally favour that party. The other party must either adhere to those terms or abandon the transaction entirely. Accordingly the terms in these contracts tend to by quite harsh, especially so in consumer transactions. The objectives of this study are to examine the degree of consumer knowledge practical use, experience of consumer problems on service contract terms and to investigate the factors which influence on the degree of experience of consumer problems related the contract terms. The data used in this empirical study included 685 consumers experienced transactions with the terms in the last two years in Seoul. Statistics used for data analysis ere Reliability, Frequencies, Means, Standard Deviation and Multiple Regression Analysis. The conclusions can be summarized as follows. 1) Actually, consumers experienced many problems related the service-contract terms, despite regulation of unfair contract terms. 2) The level of education and purchasing experience variables have affected positively to the level of consumer problem experiences related the contract terms. 3) The effect of trend and characteristics of contract terms are variables with the type of contract terms. Therefore the regulation of the contract terms have to by differently enforced according to the type of contract terms.

• Korean Journal of Human Ecology
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.577-592
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• 2005

This study analyzes the comsumer complaints that are listed on bulletin board (or Q & A page) of mobile game sites in order to search for comsumer problems in the contents of mobile games. This analysis includes 3,664 cases of complaints on 17 mobile game sites. The finding indicates that they can be categorized into 10 types of complaints: game errors, how to play, game quality, game capacity, fee inquiry, excessive fees, lack of information, refund, unfulfilment of promises, game support. The problems with the game itself account for 54.8% of total complaints, and unsatisfaction from game fees and others take up 25.5% and 19.7% respectively. Therefore, we suggest that first, the quality of mobile games and consumer education be improved, second, information about game fees be provided to consumers more sufficiently in a proper manner, and lastly pertinent regulations on consumer damages compensation and adhesion contracts be established.