Chapter 4 delves into two efforts to reinforce consent: opt-in and informed choice. It illustrates why, in the information economy, they also fail. Power asymmetries enable systemic manipulation in the design of digital products and services. Manipulation by design thwarts improved consent provisions, interfering with people’s decision-making. People’s choices regarding their privacy are determined by the designs of the systems with which they interact. European and American attempts to regulate manipulation by changing tracking from ‘opt-out’ to ‘opt-in’ and reinforcing information crash on the illusion of consent. Contract law doctrines that aim to reduce manipulation are unsuitable because they assume mutually beneficial agreements, and privacy policies are neither. Best efforts to strengthen meaningful consent and choice, even where policies are specifically intended to protect users, ultimately are insufficient because of the environment in which privacy “decisions” take place.

The notion of a “separable” arbitration agreement--- presuming that the validity and ambit of an arbitration clause are to be judged independently from that of the overall contract between the parties---is the cornerstone of the arbitration law of virtually every state. Such a rule functions to protect the agreement to arbitrate from assertions (often raised in bad faith and for purposes of delay) that the overall agreement is subject to some infirmity that necessarily “taints” the submission to arbitration as well; the impact of the rule is that such assertions fall to be decided, not by courts, but by the arbitral tribunal itself.Despite frequent objections that this allocation of authority is not “logical”---that every part of a contract must stand or fall together---the rule of “separability” is best understood as a sensible default rule respecting the probable expectation of contracting parties (who were unlikely to have contemplated that a claim, say, of fraud, and a claim going to the merits of a cause of action, would fall to be adjudicated by different decisionmakers). Application of “separability” grounded in challenges based on fraud is in fact entirely intuitive; other sorts of challenges (perhaps suggesting a failure of any consensus whatever between the parties) may be more difficult.Still, the fil conducteur is clear enough, and jurisprudence across national lines remarkably consistent.

The methods used to interpret performance obigations fail to recognize the contextuality of contracts, which creates the need to use value-balancing reasoning to determine performance obligations.

This chapter explains the main tools used by private equity firms to mitigate the “agency costs” of delegation: contractual alignment of economic interests (especially through sophisticated pay/performance sensitivity), and closer oversight through board and reporting structures.