Regulating Consumer Contracts with Government-made Templates: An Examination of Taiwan’s Approach to Boilerplate Forms

Abstract This article examines Taiwan’s approach of using government-issued contractual templates to regulate unfair terms in standard forms for consumer transactions. This article studies user agreements from a sample of two different types of electronic payment service providers (PSPs) in Taiwan, one operating under a more stringent regulatory framework and the other subject to lighter regulation. This article finds that PSPs largely adhere to the templates even when they are not obliged to do so, indicating the effectiveness of the template approach for PSPs. However, PSPs often adopt or adapt template terms in ways that maximise flexibility. This is in line with the behavioural assumption that businesses modify template terms that do not meet their business interests. Moreover, where government-issued templates are widely adopted by firms in an industry, templates begin to function like regulatory rules. In these cases, greater transparency in the creation of contractual templates is required to legitimise their role in regulating unfair terms in consumer contracts.