Unfair Trading Practices

“Unfair trading practices” is generally defined as consisting of deceptive, fraudulent, or otherwise injurious conduct, referring to practices that directly affect consumers or competitors.

In business-to-consumer relationships, unfair trading practices may involve misleading claims and advertising, conditional selling, excessive pricing, discriminatory pricing, and other misrepresentations. In business-to-business relationships, the prohibited conduct may be trade mark infringement, misappropriation, false advertising, bait-and-switch sales tactics, unauthorized substitution of brands of goods, use of confidential

information by a former employee to solicit customers, theft of trade secrets, breach of a restrictive covenant, trade libel, and false representation of products or services.

In this edition of the Comparative Law Yearbook of International Business, practicing lawyers from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union examine unfair trading practices in their respective jurisdictions.