Proxy group surveyed in automobile rental class action case

Applied Marketing Science (AMS) worked on behalf of an automobile rental company that was the target of a class action lawsuit alleging that the company’s rental contract was misleading. The plaintiffs asserted that the “fine print” in the contract led many consumers to “over-insure,” essentially duplicating coverage that already existed through their own automobile insurance or credit cards. To the contrary, our research showed that the majority of consumers were not misled; rather, they saw value in the “peace of mind” provided by the added insurance. Although we were precluded from speaking to the actual class members, we conducted our survey by assembling a proxy group of respondents that lived in an adjacent county and were demographically similar to the class members.