Center for Law & the Economy Workshop: Mateusz Grochowski (Tulane Law)

Rescheduled from October 3rd. The new date for this event is Friday, November 14th, 2025 at 11:00-12:20 PM in Room 151 of Weinmann Hall.

The Murphy Institute's Center for Law and the Economy hosts workshops each semester featuring Tulane and guest faculty from the fields of law, economics, and political science. Presenters share their latest research on a range of topics, including regulation, civil rights, the criminal legal system, and other key issues in law and political economy. Papers are distributed beforehand to the participants who read the paper and prepare discussion questions for the presenter.

The workshops, organized by Adam Feibelman, Director of the Center on Law and the Economy and Sumter D. Marks Professor of Law at Tulane Law School, are open to faculty, students, and the Tulane community. The Fall 2025 workshop series, co-convened by Associate Professor of Law and Murphy Affiliate Faculty Mateusz Grochowski, will focus on themes in consumer law, broadly construed.

Grochowski is a renowned scholar on comparative private law and law and technology. He has written extensively on contract law, comparative law, and consumer protection in intersection with digital technology. His recent projects encompass algorithmic price personalization, commodification and decommodification in the social media economy, and production of regulatory knowledge in the AI-powered digital market. He is an Affiliated Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, a Corresponding Fellow at the Yale Center for Private Law, and a Council Member of the Louisiana State Law Institute. He is also a member of the European Law Institute and the Society of European Contract Law.

Prior to Tulane, Grochowski was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, an Emile Noël Fellow at New York University School of Law, a Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center, the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University, and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He was also appointed the Member of the Office of Studies and Analyses of the Supreme Court of Poland.

Abstract:

The paper addresses a fundamental question: Is there, or can there be, a coherent idea of consumer protection in a market reality where classical concepts and mechanisms regulating interactions between individuals and firms have become dysfunctional, and where the private regulatory role of platforms is simultaneously expanding? The analysis focuses on consumer protection rules and guidelines developed by major online intermediation platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, and eBay. These companies increasingly perform a regulatory function by defining the rules and providing the infrastructures through which suppliers conclude contracts with users. A growing number of these private regulatory instruments tackle, in diverse ways, issues traditionally falling within the scope of consumer law—such as information asymmetries, abuses of bargaining power, and the substandard quality of goods and services—that frequently arise between providers and customers. The specific characteristics of the platform economy—notably its transnational nature and the blurring of boundaries between the roles of professional and consumer—significantly limit the applicability of classical consumer protection frameworks, which were designed and enforced by states or other sovereign entities. The paper aims to elucidate the market logic underlying these emerging private regulations and to examine what kinds of consumer interests, if any, they effectively protect. In its normative dimension, the study draws on the concept of regulatory intermediaries developed in regulatory governance scholarship to assess the prospects of engaging large technology firms—particularly online platforms—as potential co-regulators in matters of consumer protection.