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The European Commission has launched the Regulation Proposal on a Common European Sales Law as an optional instrument for European firms and consumers. Several critical opinions have been raised against the optional nature, characterizing it as an instrument for social dumping (i. e. lowering consumer protection standards, given that no set of rules with higher levels of protection would ever be chosen by firms), as depriving consumers of any meaningful choice, and emphasizing its futility. In this paper we present a simple model showing how these critiques present theoretical flaws, even if one does not rely on the efficiency gains that increasing cross border trade may bring in terms of having more efficient firms serving consumers in other national markets. The role of verification or compliance costs, and of the impact of legal diversity on firms' operating costs is crucial for understanding the effects of an optional instrument, and may make high levels of consumer protection, and consumer choice implementable. We also characterize how different levels of the standard may lead to complete replacement of national standards and to the joint use of European and national standards.

The use of social networking sites, such as Twitter, for various purposes, continues to grown since its first appearance. This social net is a microblogging site to share short messages on a variety of topics. In particular, political elections are a very interesting field to exchange views using this platform. In this paper we have used Spanish elections to investigate the use of Twitter for this purpose, and to find out if the conversations maintained there can anticipate, in some way, the results of the elections. In order to do this, we have developed a tool, called Tara tweet, to define experiments and to capture the defined conversations, and have applied it to the cases of three Spanish elections during 2011 and 2012. Our results show that Twitter is used for political discussion, and that the references to the different political parties correlate, significatively, with the votes of the electors. This is an indicator that Twitter may be used by social researchers as a tool, among others, to predict future results of the elections. Of course, with due caution because the measured data correspond to distinct actions, so obviously, much more research and studies should be done in this field.