Jenna Päläs is a researcher and a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Law at the University of Lapland. She is doing her PhD thesis on “Protection of the Customer in Peer-to-peer-based Sharing Economy Services and Products, Especially in Different Types of Crowdfunding”. Her main areas of interests are the contractual relations between resource providers, resource users and the intermediaries who operate online platforms and facilitate resource exchange between the aforementioned peers. Her current research interests include platform-hosted, peer-to-peer-based exchange and contracting; technology-enabled collaboration and its interaction with law and contracting practices; regulatory and consumer policy issues; proactive approaches to risk management and protection of those individuals who use platforms to share and purchase different resources such as time, money, commodities etc.; legal restrictions to the freedom of contract of the peer participators and the boundaries to active participation. Additionally, she is interested in how technological innovations and applications reform the framework of contract and private law; and how new ways of cooperation could be developed in a sustainable way.