The United States is the Wild West of algorithmic personalized pricing. It is practiced (and researched) extensively, possibly more than anywhere else in the world, and at the same time, it is less regulated than in many of the jurisdictions surveyed in this Handbook, most notably the European Union (EU) and China. This is not necessarily puzzling. American corporations have been the driving force behind many of the technological innovations associated with the rise and development of algorithmic personalized pricing. However, there is a long tradition in the US of opposition to regulating markets, and algorithmic personalized pricing exemplifies this approach.

Many of our pressing questions about price personalization concern its current practice and potential regulations. We could be tempted to move directly to those hard questions because many – but not all – consumers, scholars, and regulators already believe with some confidence that price personalization harms consumers or treats them unfairly. In this chapter, I pause to unpack intuitions about harm and unfairness and consider systematically what the normative problems with price personalization might be so that our understanding can inform what we look for in existing practice and what we aim to achieve with new regulations.

Medical debt is the largest form of consumer debt in collections, with $88 billion recorded on credit reports, affecting roughly one in five US households. Medical debt pushes millions into financial distress and is exacerbated by harsh collection practices to garnish wages, seize assets, place liens on homes, and reduce creditworthiness. Concerned federal and state policymakers have pursued policies to protect consumers from medical debt.

Most federal medical debt policies are forms of public law – namely administrative requirements imposed by government on health care and consumer finance entities. Nevertheless, significant gaps in the federal public law of medical debt persist, leaving an important role for states, particularly in the creation of private enforcement actions for violations of state consumer protections against medical debt. States have created both public law and private law protections, prescribing standards for financial assistance, applying to a broader range of providers, barring certain collection actions, and empowering individuals to seek private remedies for violations.

Is medical debt better addressed at the federal or state level and using the tools public law or private law? The answer is all the above: Stronger national, public-law standards to guard against medical debt are critical, but federal policy should retain a vital role for what states do well – policy innovation and greater enforcement through private remedies. Preserving a meaningful role for states and private law in consumer protection policy enhances separation of powers and serves as a check against regulatory failure by federal public law solutions and the gutting of federal administrative and statutory authority.

Personalized pricing is a form of pricing where different customers are charged different prices for the same product depending on their ability to pay, based on the information that the trader holds of a potential customer. Pricing plays a relevant role in the decision-making process by the consumers, and a firm’s performance can be determined by the ability of the business entities to execute a pricing strategy accordingly. Further, pricing also determines the quality, value, and willingness to buy. Usually the willingness of a consumer depends on transparency and fairness.

Technological developments have enabled online sellers to personalize prices of the goods and services.

As the personalization of e-commerce transactions continues to intensify, the law and policy implications of algorithmic personalized pricing (APP) should be top of mind for regulators. Price is often the single most important term of consumer transactions. APP is a form of online discriminatory pricing practice whereby suppliers set prices based on consumers’ personal information with the objective of getting as close as possible to their maximum willingness to pay. As such, APP raises issues of competition, privacy, personal data protection, contract, consumer protection, and anti-discrimination law.

This book chapter looks at the legality of APP from a Canadian perspective in competition, commercial consumer law, and personal data protection law.

AI brings risks but also opportunities for consumers. When it comes to consumer law, which traditionally focuses on protecting consumers’ autonomy and self-determination, the increased use of AI also poses major challenges. This chapter discusses both the challenges and opportunities of AI in the consumer context (Section 10.2 and 10.3) and provides a brief overview of some of the relevant consumer protection instruments in the EU legal order (Section 10.4). A case study on dark patterns illustrates the shortcomings of the current consumer protection framework more concretely (Section 10.5).

Society needs to influence and mould our expectations so AI is used for the collective good. we should be reluctant to throw away hard (and recently) won consumer rights and values on the altar of technological developments.

This chapter commences with a comprehensive overview of Australia’s legal framework on consumer credit. Subsequently, it considers the major obligations applied to Australian credit licence holders in this context, with a particular focus on licensing requirements, disclosure, responsible lending, best interests obligations and various consumer rights. Additionally, given the increased consumer access to high-cost payday loans facilitated by digitalisation, this chapter discusses the relevant issues and proposals for reform.

Consumers are at the forefront of market uses of AI. There are also myriad consumer uses of AI products. Consumer protection law justifies greater responses where the interactions involve significant risks and relevant consumer vulnerability; both such elements are present in the current and predicted AI uses concerning consumers. Whilst consumer protection law is likely to be able to be sufficiently flexible to adapt to AI, there is a need to recalibrate consumer protection law to AI.

The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) provides for free movement of the factors of production, but also for derogations from free movement where necessary to protect important interests such as public policy, public security and public health. These have been broadened out by the Court of Justice to include other public interest objectives, including the environment and consumer protection, which can also be relied on under certain conditions. All these derogations and protections are to be applied subject to certain conditions – they must be restrictively interpreted, non-discriminatory, procedurally fair and applied in a proportionate and consistent way. Alongside these, there are specific exceptions applying to occupations, excluding public service and official authority from the scope of Articles 45, 49 and 56 TFEU.

Chapter 2 looks at transparency and fintech tools. The premise behind many so-called fintech innovations in consumer markets is to make more personalised financial products available to an often underserved and largely inexperienced cohort. Many consumers are not good at managing their day-to-day finances, selecting optimal credit products or investing for the future. Fintech products, and the applications associated with them, are commonly promoted on the basis they will use consumer data, AI capacities, and a lower cost basis to promote competition and better serve consumers, including financially excluded or vulnerable consumers. Paterson, Miller, and Lyons challenge these premises by demystifying the kinds of capacities that are possible through the fintech technologies being offered to consumers. The most common form of fintech solutions offered to consumers are credit, budgeting, and investment tools. These typically do not disrupt existing service models through the use of deep learning AI. Rather they are commonly enabled by encoding the rules of thumb used by mortgage brokers and financial advisers. They make a return through methods criticised on when deployed by social media platforms, namely on-selling data, targeted advertising, and commission-based sales. There is moreover little incentive for fintech providers to make products that benefit marginalised cohorts for whom there is minimal relevant data and little likelihood of lucrative return. The authors argue that greater transparency is required about what is being offered to consumers though fintech tools and who benefits from them, along with greater accountability for ill-founded and even sensationalised claims.

In this chapter, we offer a number of recommendations for those who are in a position to do something technically, structurally, and legally or otherwise to minimize the risk of psychological harm that comes with the public’s use of social media and other online sites, especially their engagement with graphic or other upsetting digital material. We outline the policy implications of what we’ve learned from more than three years of desk research and original interviews that we have conducted with dozens of people, ranging from technologists to psychologists to content moderators to human rights investigators and beyond. We first spotlight the competing interests that underscore social media companies and governments’ policy deliberations with regard to content moderation. Next, we lay out our suggestions for companies, governments, and individuals with regard to how to improve the experiences of both content moderators and everyday social media users. We close with suggestions for creating a more “pro-social” online environment, one that not only better mitigates the risks of psychological harm but potentially encourages greater connection, resulting in wellness and even flourishing.

A general premise of consumer protection is that greater consumer information and more competition in a market should increase the tendency of firms to behave fairly and honestly.1 In the case of deceptive promotional pricing, greater consumer information comes from having more consumers in the market being attentive to and knowledgeable of reference promotional pricing (i.e. showing a regular price along with the sales price).

There is a long-standing consensus on the need to fight poverty and eliminate it. Some fifty-five years ago, the American President Lyndon B. Johnson launched a “War on Poverty” in his 1964 State of the Union Address. Nevertheless, poverty is still a striking problem. In the United States, more than 46 million Americans lived in poverty in 2012.2 Worldwide, billions live on less than eight US dollars a day,3 and hundreds of millions on less than one dollar a day.4 Poverty is a complex, multifaceted, and persistent problem.5

The final chapter draws on conclusions from the current use of emerging technologies in Africa, digitalization and strategies which can be implemented to help the continent capitalize on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It contributes to policy discussions and adds a more inclusive approach in analyzing 4IR areas of impact. By analyzing a range of leading and emerging countries, a new framework has been established that gives further study of strengths and weaknesses in developing and developed nations. This book helps to address the route that Africa needs to take to achieve sustainable and inclusive growth. The 4IR is inevitable, which is why governments need to recognize the impact it will have on industries and the global economy.