Asian Business Law Institute and Singapore Academy of Law

September 2023

Despite its increasing popularity and usage, the term online dispute resolution, or ODR, suffers from a lack of clarity. Some see it as the online version of alternative dispute resolution or even dispute resolution in general. Others understand ODR to be the internal or on-platform services provided by e-commerce operators to resolve consumer e-commerce disputes. Further still, is the association between ODR and automated dispute resolution.

There also appears to be insufficient understanding of the actual operation of ODR schemes in real-life use cases around aspects such as the nature of the ODR operator, the method of ODR and the legal basis of ODR, to name a few.

Online Dispute Resolution in Asia thus aims to provide some clarity to the ODR concept by examining several main ODR schemes operating in three key Asian jurisdictions: China, India and Singapore. By looking at those schemes which are representative of private, public and hybrid forms of ODR in detail, the publication attempts to distill common denominators to aid the understanding of ODR by readers from diverse backgrounds, as well as the further development of ODR by policymakers and industry players.