We investigate the impact of sanctions in the presence of abusive contract terms in a litigation model under asymmetric information on consumers’ ability to litigate. A firm may decide to write an abusive clause to extract part of a consumer’s surplus. Facing such a clause, consumers can seek compensation at a cost, but only a fraction of them are ready to go to court to obtain this compensation. If the case is brought to court, the abusive clause is unenforceable. We then explore the consequences of introducing an additional sanction to this unenforceability. Our results show that the mere non-enforcement of abusive clauses has no deterrent effect. However, the introduction of an additional sanction has to be done carefully because under certain conditions, it leads to more deterrence but may also worsen the utilities of some consumers and generate mixed effects on welfare.

我们在消费者诉讼能力信息不对称的诉讼模型中调查了在存在滥用合同条款的情况下制裁的影响。公司可能决定编写一个滥用条款来提取消费者的部分剩余。面对这样的条款，消费者可以有偿寻求赔偿，但只有一小部分人准备上法庭获得这种赔偿。如果将案件提交法庭，滥用条款将无法执行。然后，我们探讨了对这种不可执行性引入额外制裁的后果。我们的研究结果表明，仅仅不执行滥用条款没有威慑作用。但是，引入额外制裁必须谨慎，因为在某些情况下，