Consumers’ Rights in the Shadow of the Brand: A Conjoint Experiment on the Valuation and Trade-Offs of Contractual Rights

With the rise of standard contracts, tensions persist between protecting consumers from unfair terms and preserving freedom of contract. A key concern is that consumers may waive legal rights, often unknowingly, particularly when dealing with trusted brands. To address this, we conducted a conjoint experiment with a representative US sample to evaluate how consumers value legal rights—such as warranties, liability, privacy, and conflict resolution—when they are fully aware, understand the terms, and must trade them off against product features like price and brand reputation. Our findings reveal that even when rights can be traded off against other features of the product, consumers value legal rights. Of the legal rights we tested, warranties and price were found to be the most decisive factors in their purchase decisions. Notably, we did not find evidence that brand reputation significantly alters the valuation of legal rights. These insights offer important empirical evidence to enrich the extensive policy debate.