Auckland University is looking for people to complete an online survey about standard form contracts.

Insurance policies, bank service agreements, loan agreements, investment opportunities etc are all contracts usually offered on a “take it or leave it” basis. In other words, you often don't have a chance to negotiate. Lawyers call these “standard form contracts” and they are often assumed (by lawyers and judges) to be unfair in at least some respects.

The Department of Commercial Law at the University of Auckland is conducting a a web-based survey to investigate public perception of the fairness of certain terms in a standard form insurance contract. The results may be published in learned journals and other media and they may assist in reforming the law.

The survey will take some of the commonly accepted reasons why standard form contracts are thought to be unfair and test whether the public thinks they are unfair, and if so, why.

An important goal of the survey is to rank some of the commonly accepted reasons for unfairness in order of importance and also to ask “free form” questions to see if participants can provide reasons for unfairness that the researchers have not already thought of.
 
The research team invite you to participate in the brief online survey. It will take no more than 20 minutes to complete, and is anonymous. By completing the survey you will be entered into a draw to win an Apple iPad 2.

If you would like to participate in the survey or read more about the research, please go to:

http://tinyurl.com/contract-fairness-survey or http://survey.fmhs.auckland.ac.nz/survey/index.php?sid=93398&lang=en.

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