IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/amlawe/v15y2013i2p443-494.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Competition and Unconscionability

Author

Listed:
  • Ezra Friedman

Abstract

This paper argues that the conventional legal doctrine that emphasizes lack of choice among suppliers or contracts as an element of unconscionability is misguided. I show that when a seller with significant market power offers only one contract, fear of alienating sophisticated customers can discourage the seller from exploiting the unsophisticated with an inefficient contract. In contrast, competitive sellers may lose money on sophisticated customers, and be willing to sacrifice them in order to exploit the unsophisticated. Likewise, offering a choice of contracts enables sellers to exploit the unsophisticated while offering an efficient contract to the sophisticated. Copyright 2013, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Ezra Friedman, 2013. "Competition and Unconscionability," American Law and Economics Review, American Law and Economics Association, vol. 15(2), pages 443-494.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:15:y:2013:i:2:p:443-494
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/aler/aht008
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Abraham L. Wickelgren, 2016. "An Economic Analysis of Arbitration versus Litigation for Contractual Disputes," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 59(2), pages 393-410.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:15:y:2013:i:2:p:443-494. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/aler .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.