The Research On Claim For Punitive Damage Of Customers

Punitive damages originated in Common Law System, gained muchdevelopment and later spread to other countries. The main reason is that with therapid development of social economy, the proprietor and customer are opposites insocial interest group. The proprietor has more power than ordinary customers for itsfinancial resources, material resources and human resources. Besides, the leadingposition in the market depends on the speed, width and depth of gaining theinformation. In real deals, proprietors and customers have different forms of interestsas well as sharp conflicts of interests due to asymmetry of information, transactionexpense and people’s limited rationality. In these conflicts, consumers are at adisadvantage and always at the risk of great loss caused by proprietors’ fraud andother malicious behavior. Therefore, countries all over the world began to putemphasis on law-making to protect customers and regulate proprietors’ behavior.Thus, Punitive damages came into being.Law on Protection of the Rights and Interests of Consumers was enacted in1993and amended in2013. It first established punitive damages. Many laws enacted latercontained details of punitive damages. How the right of claim punitive damages isapplied and realized is a question for study. For one thing, the constitutiverequirements are not always the same in different legal provisions, so theapplicability of the law needs to be researched. Furthermore, anti-counterfeitprofessionals represented by Wang Hai appeared under the specific circumstance ofChina’s social development. Evidence for anti-counterfeit becomes a means to makea living and survive. The anti-counterfeit professionals gradually came into being inthe name of safeguarding rights and for the purpose of compensation. Whether theyare applied to punitive damages has been a heated debate for many years. On January9th,2014, regulations on some problems about the law applicability of casedisputes concerning food and drugs by the Supreme Court was announced officially.Some scholars believe that the heated debate on whether the anti-counterfeitprofessionals who buy fake products in spite of the awareness of the fake in order tomake a living should be protected by law finally came to the conclusion. The judicialjudging standard and requirements for law applicability reached an agreement.The research subject of this article is the Claim for Punitive Damage ofCustomers and it consists of four chapters:The first chapter mainly describes the origin and concept of punitive damage.On the basis of current theory, it further defines the inherent meaning of punitivedamage and its various functions or roles as well as the basic theory, such asdevelopment of legislation related to punitive damages in China. Meanwhile, itintroduces the following constitutive requirements for the claim for punitivedamages through the current situation of legislation.The second chapter is divided into four sections. The first to third sectionsdiscusses the constitutive requirements for the claim for punitive damages in “Lawon Protection of the Rights and Interests of Consumers”,“Food Safety Law” and“Tort Liability Law”. Besides, it respectively describes the application of this claimfrom four aspects: objective behavior, subjective behavior, result and causality, andcombines specific cases to make analysis. It especially defines the concepts withgreat dispute or vague in theory, such as “fraud”,“be fully aware” and “deficiency”and discusses the hot topic applicable in occupational fraud at present. It assumesthat the behavior of buying fake products on purpose in the field of food and drugscan gain support except for other fields. Then it proposes the legislation suggestionfor existing problems.The third chapter emphasizes the setting, standard and calculation of punitiveamount in current legislation and points out the potential disadvantage and problemsin fixed compensation amount. Then it proposes proper suggestions for theregulation of the amount of punitive damage, thus realizing the punitive anddeterrent effect of punitive compensation. Finally, the fourth chapter makes a conclusion and makes innovation andattempt from four aspects: applicable subject, applicable scope, objective aspect andamount setting. The initial phase of system development can be innovated anddeveloped through absorbing the practical experience of western countries andcombining Chinese national situation.