| Abstract: |
The proliferation of digital commerce platforms has fundamentally reconfigured the contractual landscape between businesses and consumers, engendering a systematic imbalance wherein platform operators unilaterally draft and enforce standard form contracts laden with unfair terms. This empirical study investigates the prevalence, typology, and impact of Unfair Contract Terms (UCTs) across 1,000 platform-based transactions spanning five major categories of digital commerce operating in multiple jurisdictions. Employing a mixed-methods research design that integrates content analysis of Terms of Service (ToS) documents, consumer survey data, and cross-jurisdictional regulatory benchmarking, the study finds that 85.4% of sampled platform agreements contain at least one identifiably unfair clause, with gig economy platforms exhibiting the highest UCT density at 93.9%. Quantitative analysis reveals that platform market share (r = 0.72, p < 0.001), Terms length, and consumer awareness levels are the strongest predictors of UCT severity. Regression modelling (R2 = 0.681) confirms that regulatory effectiveness and digital literacy serve as significant protective moderators. The findings expose critical asymmetries between contractual freedom and consumer protection in contemporary platform economies and call for adaptive, jurisdiction-sensitive regulatory frameworks that embed fairness principles into the architecture of digital commerce governance. |
