Introduction to the special issue on consumer protection

Abstract

This article introduces the Marketing Science Special Issue on Consumer Protection. This special issue and an accompanying conference were conceived as a partnership with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. We outline the potential areas and opportunities for academic scholarship in marketing to inform regulation on consumer protection. We group the areas of potential research and the papers in the special issue into three broad buckets: (1) what consumers need protection from, especially the need for regulations in new industries; (2) the impact of existing regulations; and (3) the distri-butional impact of regulations. The article concludes with a call for ongoing policy-relevant research on consumer protection.