Within the context of mass production, consumers represent a vulnerable category since they are the weaker contracting party due to the existing information asymmetry between companies and customers. Moreover, consumers suffer from new forms of vulnerability due to the combination of new technological phenomena – such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data – and the latest findings in neuroscience, which allows businesses to have a monopoly on the newly acquired knowledge on consumers’ purchase decision-making. This article aims at analysing the new technological trends in digital marketing that show the increasing role of ‘AI emotional marketing’ as a tool to access the inner and unconscious layers of consumers’ mind to redirect their economic choices. In this respect, the article will focus on the legal notion of ‘autonomy’ within the EU legislation on consumer protection and contract law, in order to investigate whether the current legal framework is well equipped to counteract the new form of algorithmic manipulation in the digital market.

Digital platforms have emerged as crucial infrastructures in today’s economy, facilitating digital transactions between buyers and sellers. However, propelled by network effects and other sources of market power, digital platforms are generally the stronger party in their relations with users, and this could lead them to abuse their market power through exclusionary and exploitative practices. While extensive consumer regulations shield consumers in business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions, scant protection is afforded to businesses in presumed peer-to-peer business-to-business (B2B) transactions. Although certain EU provisions, such as Article 102 TFEU, Regulation 1150/2019 and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), aim to safeguard business users in platform-to-business (P2B) contexts, their effectiveness is constrained. These regulations and provisions are often too narrow in scope, fail to consider the platform’s unique features, prioritise public interests over those of individual businesses and lack effective remedies. Conversely, some Member States have adopted abuse of economic dependence regulations, potentially offering stronger protection, as such an approach provides more flexibility and emphasises contractual fairness for individual business users. The present article attempts to show that business users are in fact economically dependent on the platform, thereby suggesting that an EU level prohibition of abuse of economic dependence could more effectively address the existing gaps in protection.

This article discusses how faith-based investing addresses sustainability, focusing on Catholic, Church of England, and Islamic faith-based investing in the US, the UK and Malaysia, respectively, as illustrative examples. It posits that there are three dimensions to how these three institutional religions approach sustainability through faith-based investing, namely the underpinning religious values and principles, the legal and regulatory framework governing faith-based investing, and investment stewardship approaches. Section 2 provides an overview of sustainability and sustainable finance, situating faith-based investing within the universe of socially responsible investing and environmental, social and governance investing. Section 3 delves into sustainability and the values and organising principles underpinning Catholic, Church of England, and Islamic faith-based investing to highlight areas of conceptual alignment and their nexus to sustainability. Section 4 examines the legal and regulatory frameworks governing faith-based investing contrasting an extensive reliance on soft law in the US context with specifically tailored law and regulation for Islamic faith-based investing in Malaysia and considers its implications on the certification of faith-based investing as a central element. Section 5 compares the faith-based investment stewardship approaches in these jurisdictions to identify areas of convergence and divergence. Section 6 reflects on the broader opportunities which faith-based investing encounters in its development and the challenges it faces in advancing sustainability.

Despite the immense impact of COVID-19 on the business environment, the Hong Kong (HK) courts did not find room for the operation of the frustration doctrine. While all the reported HK cases involved leases, they offer valuable lessons on the theoretical basis of frustration and how the ‘radical change in nature of obligations’ test is critically concerned with characterising the nature of the bargain. Beyond their precedential value, the decisions point to the limits of contractual construction and the need to recognise the role of legal policy in exercising what is in effect judicial risk allocation when applying the doctrine of frustration.

By carrying out a large-scale investigation of judicial decisions delivered from 2009 to April 2023, this article analyses and presents Chinese experiences in retaining contractual equilibrium through the doctrine of change of circumstances. They include the judiciary’s three-step analytical framework based on the shared assumption theory and the contractual equilibrium theory, categorisation of the disrupted contractual equilibrium caused by a change of circumstance, and elaboration on the relationships between the three doctrines regarding unexpected circumstances (i.e. the doctrine of change of circumstances, the doctrine of frustration of the purpose of the contract and the doctrine of force majeure) under Chinese contract law. This article, for the first time, systemically elaborates on the Chinese judicial analytical approaches in applying the doctrine of change of circumstances through a large-scale investigation of judicial decisions and clearly shows the doctrine’s distinct role in the context of unexpected circumstances. The discussions help to gain a deep understanding of the application of the Chinese doctrine of change of circumstances in real life and are of great value for nourishing the comparative law discourse of the rules of unexpected circumstances.