M-EPLI Projects

Using AI for consumer protection – creating AI based persona for mystery shopping

Researcher
Caroline Cauffman, Pedro Hernández Serrano

Type of the project
NWA Idea Generator

Main issue(s) addressed
Creation of persona for consumer protection

Duration
1 September 2020 - 31 August 2021

Short description
The Consumer protection cooperation regulation allows consumer authorities to conduct mystery shopping, meaning that a consumer authority may pretend to be a consumer with certain characteristics in order to find out how the (online) seller treats the consumer and, in particular, whether one consumer gets different prices, different advertising etc. than another consumer based on eg. his characterisation as a deal hunter or a negligent shopper. These selling practices are made possible by personalisation based on big data mining and manipulative techniques that often cross the line of the prohibition of unfair commercial practices and infringe the rights of consumers.

Detection of these practices requires the creation of personas, fake identities with certain characteristics which the consumer authority can use. The manual creation of persona is a time intensive exercise.

When discussing consumer law enforcement with the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM), its director of consumer affairs indicated his desire to automatically generate personas based on big (consumer) data and have a bot impersonating these personas doing the mystery shopping. Although the ACM has an e-hub, it does not have the expertise for this. Brainstorming with computer scientists of my University, led to the conclusion that such a tool raises challenging questions both from a legal and a technical perspective. 

Therefore we agreed with the ACM to carry out a feasibility study for such a tool to see how we can tackle this issue.

Researcher
Gijs van Dijck 

Type of the project
Research

Main issue(s) addressed
The Impact of Non-Monetary Relief on Decision-Making

Duration

Short description
Research includes the question whether non-monetary relief such as apologies increases the likelihood of adverse liability determinations, and whether having obtained non-monetary relief at the fault stage makes it less likely to claim damages on the compenation level.

Researcher 
Mark Kawakami

Type of the project
SectorPlan Research

Main issue(s) addressed
Global Normativities: Risks and Opportunities of Globalization Process

Duration

Short description
Research on incentivizing prosocial behaviors in companies and their stakeholders through soft power/soft law instruments.

Researcher
Anna Beckers 

Type of the project
Research/Sector plan research

Main issue(s) addressed
Documents, data, derivatives: Law and the infrastructure of global production​

Duration
 

Short description
I am interested in the role of the law in global value chains (GVC). The structure and geography of GVCs is already an establishd research topic in social science disciplines ranging from political economy, economic geography to anthropology. With the trend of imposing obligations on lead firms to organise their global production patterns, but also evolving global private regulation within GVCs, it is also legal scholars that seek to understand GVCs from a legal perspective. Taking note of these developments, my aim is to better understand the contribution of the law, in particular private law, to the legal construction of global value chains. For this purpose, I conduct legal research on substantive private law and private international law categories with a view to understanding how these legal rules contingently structure and support the way in which global value chains operates and, as a result, the potential of the law to restructure them. My research builds on the assumption that legal research requires a fundamental re-conceptualization of global production as a basis for regulating them appropriately. Currently, legal research defines GVCs in an incomplete manner and, as a result, overlooks important legal rules that are relevant for understanding how global production is organised.

Concretely, legal research portrays GVCs as de-territorialized chains of contracts under the influence of a nationally incorporated chain leader that can be an addressee of legal obligations and a potent regulatory subject overseeing its GVC. Social science and economic geography research, in contrast, shows that GVCs are complex interlaced and networked structures that are also themselves spatially embedded. As a result, accepting this network character and the embeddedness requires researching not only the legal construction of value chain, but also specifically their construction through a network of global infrastructure, specifically logistics, ICT and finance. This requires legal research into the rules that constitute the infrastructure (law of infrastructure), the inherent normativity and regulatory potential of infrastructure (law in infrastructure) and the infrastructural orientation of laws that regulate global value chains (law for infrastructure).

The Transparency Principle in European Property Law 

Researcher
Anna Berlee

Type of the project
PhD 

Main issue(s) addressed
Is transparency (still) a fundamental principle of property law in Europe?

Short description
One of the main distinguishing features of property rights as opposed to personal rights is their possibility to bind third parties. The justification for the ability to bind third parties, is that third parties are adequately informed about the existence and content of such a right. They must be public (Publicity) and it must be clear as to which object they relate (Specificity). This is laid down by the transparency principle. Legal reality however is somewhat different, and exceptions to the principle are plentiful. The research is aimed at discovering the nature of transparency, the extent of its existence in five Member States of the European Union and what that means for a (possible) EU autonomous transparency principle.

Duration
1 September 2011 - 31 August 2015

Researcher
William Bull 

Type of the project
PhD 

Main issue(s) addressed
To what extent is the attractiveness of optional instruments to end users dependent on their instrument-specific provision?

Short description
Research project focuses on existing and proposed optional instruments in different fields of EU law, including contract, company and intellectual property law, in order to analyze the benefits and disadvantages of creating optional private law at European level, and to what extent these differ depending on the particular optional instrument in question.

Duration
1 June 2011 - 31 May 2015

Researcher
Agustin Parise

Type of the project
PhD

Main issue(s) addressed
The project will study socio-historical events that took place in American jurisdictions, and that influenced changes in the concept of ownership.

Short description
The project encompasses a comparative legal-historical study of European and American law and culture. The project addresses the concept of ownership in a selection of American jurisdictions. The project will provide new knowledge on the influence that European law had in the property law of American jurisdictions.

Duration
01 October 2011 – 01 October 2015

Researcher
Liao Wenqing 

Type of the project
PhD

Main issue(s) addressed
The applicability of the efficient breach doctrine in contract practice

Short description
The Economic Analysis of Law has given rise to many projects seeking to explain the relationship between legal rules and economic efficiency. One of these projects involves the well-known concept of efficient breach. The paper will give a brief profile of this doctrine and show how to coordinate it with 
legal rules and practices.   

Duration
01 September 2011 – 31 August 2015