Structural Immunity: How Platform Dominance and Mandatory Arbitration Create Corporate Impunity

Executive Summary

Corporate accountability depends on the ability of harmed parties to pursue remedies. This paper develops a quantitative model demonstrating that the combination of platform dominance and mandatory arbitration creates a six-filter multiplicative pipeline that suppresses complaints to negligible survival rates. Each filter — market structure lock-in, contractual waiver, procedural complexity, resource asymmetry, temporal attrition, and rational apathy — independently reduces the probability that a legitimate grievance reaches adjudication. Their multiplicative interaction produces survival rates orders of magnitude below what any single filter would achieve.

Calibrating against Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) data yields a stark result: approximately 600 filings per 80 million affected consumers, a survival rate of 0.00075%. This is not a measure of the absence of harm; it is a measure of the structural suppression of redress. The pipeline does not require active malice or conspiracy — each filter operates through ordinary institutional mechanisms (standard contract terms, standard procedural requirements, standard resource constraints) that produce extraordinary aggregate suppression.

Single-filter removal analysis reveals that the remaining filters compensate, maintaining high suppression rates even when one mechanism is eliminated. This has direct implications for reform: targeted interventions that address only one filter (e.g., banning mandatory arbitration) are insufficient because the multiplicative pipeline redistributes suppression across the surviving filters. The paper extends the model to four sectors — consumer finance, gig economy, social media, and healthcare — and analyzes reform effectiveness, using the No Surprises Act as a worked example of a reform that disrupted multiple filters simultaneously.

Key Contributions and Methodology

The paper's primary contribution is formalizing complaint suppression as a multiplicative filter pipeline rather than an additive list of barriers. Prior analyses of access to justice have catalogued individual obstacles — cost, complexity, contractual restrictions — without modeling their interaction. The multiplicative framework reveals that even modest per-filter suppression rates (e.g., 80% attrition at each of six stages) compound to near-total suppression (0.006% survival), and that the specific per-filter values are less important than the number of sequential filters.

The six filters are derived from structural analysis of the consumer-corporation complaint pathway. Market structure lock-in prevents exit as an alternative to voice. Contractual waiver (mandatory arbitration clauses, class action waivers) eliminates collective remedies. Procedural complexity raises the knowledge barrier to initiating individual claims. Resource asymmetry ensures that corporations can outlast individuals in any sustained proceeding. Temporal attrition exploits the asymmetry between corporate time horizons and individual patience. Rational apathy captures the final filter: even individuals who survive the first five stages may rationally conclude that the expected value of continued pursuit is negative.

The four-sector extension demonstrates that while the specific filter intensities vary across consumer finance, gig economy, social media, and healthcare, the multiplicative structure is invariant. Each sector exhibits all six filters, calibrated to its specific institutional context. The No Surprises Act analysis serves as a natural experiment in multi-filter disruption, showing that effective reform must address at least two or three filters simultaneously to achieve meaningful improvement in complaint survival rates.

Key Findings

• Six-filter pipeline: Market structure lock-in, contractual waiver, procedural complexity, resource asymmetry, temporal attrition, and rational apathy form a multiplicative suppression chain
• CFPB calibration: 600 filings per 80 million consumers yields a 0.00075% survival rate, quantifying the structural suppression of redress
• Compensatory dynamics: Single-filter removal shows remaining filters compensate, maintaining high suppression rates — targeted reform is insufficient
• Four-sector generalization: Consumer finance, gig economy, social media, and healthcare all exhibit the six-filter structure with sector-specific calibrations
• Multi-filter reform requirement: Effective reform must disrupt at least two or three filters simultaneously, as demonstrated by the No Surprises Act analysis
• No conspiracy required: Each filter operates through ordinary institutional mechanisms; extraordinary suppression emerges from ordinary-mechanism composition

Key References