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From the viewpoint of a project management practitioner instead of a traditional comparative law researcher, this article attempts to analyze the legal concerns and risks facing project managers and project management in general and compare these legal concerns and risks between the small jurisdiction Macao and such major jurisdictions as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Hong Kong. Without being specific to any particular industry, these legal concerns and risks are identified and subsumed under three general perspectives, namely, contract disputes, liability for defects and delays, and labor and employment issues. Drawing on academic literature, statutes, acts, and court cases of relevance, this article dwells on these three perspectives as they matter to project management in general, cites the related key legal statutes and acts in these three perspectives in respect of project management, illuminates the statues' and acts' essence, and compares them across the aforementioned jurisdictions. Some salient findings are that Macao, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Hong Kong all appear to resemble each other in the legal regulation of the three aforesaid perspectives such that project management and project manager seem to be prone to rather similar legal concerns and risks across all these jurisdictions. However, in fact, it is more challenging in Macao for project managers to evaluate and manage legal concerns and risks than in the other jurisdictions above because of two reasons. First, Macao's legal framework is so distinct and unique that project managers are not able to evaluate the impact, incidence, and probability of any legal risk's happening by analogy with the precedent court cases elsewhere. Second, there is a key difference between Macao as a small jurisdiction and the other jurisdictions above in that the former is inevitably short of a substantial volume of local precedent court cases. This dearth of local precedent court cases substantively hinders a project manager from evaluating the impact, incidence, and probability of any legal concern's or risk's happening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic gaming machines (EGMs), emulating mechanical slot machines, were the first and most quintessential category of electronic gambling equipment at casinos. Usability and user experience evaluation of EGMs, as information systems, can often serve as a baseline against which comparable evaluation of other younger electronic gambling equipment, also as information systems, can be benchmarked. In contrast, electronic table games (ETGs), being electronic versions of standard, traditional table games, are usually regarded as comparatively new-fangled equipment vis-à-vis EGMs. This article focuses on benchmarking gamblers' perceived usability of and user experience with ETGs against EGMs. Adopting the major constructs of the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) along with the additional construct "trust" and operationalizing these constructs in accordance with the literature, such constructs as "perceived ease of use", "perceived usefulness", "perceived risk", "attitude", "social influence", "innovativeness", "stress to use a technology" and "trust" in respect of ETGs' and EGMs' perceived usability and user experience were rated by n = 694 respondents in a questionnaire survey conducted in late 2022 in Macao. Paired-samples t -tests were applied to each constructs' ratings of ETGs and EGMs. It was found that of all these constructs, only the population mean differences in the ratings of constructs "perceived risk" and "attitude" between ETGs and EGMs were greater than zero. The implication is that among the various perspectives of perceived usability and user experience, only the risk prevention of and the attitude towards existing ETGs' designs outperform the counterparts of existing EGM's designs, which can often be treated as the baseline for such benchmarking. This article also purports to a speculative reason for such findings. In conclusion, not only are much younger ETGs by no means trounced by long-standing EGMs in terms of gamblers' perceived usability and user experience but also ETGs have also surpassed EGMs in the perspectives of risk prevention and the attitude towards such electronic gambling equipment. This article advises that further research be undertaken to investigate the underlying reason for the above findings, especially, whether the speculative reason proposed in this article is true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Casino operation is generally considered as a controversial leisure industry. Given its electronic gambling equipment being highly specialized information systems specific to the industry, such equipment has not drawn much attention from the literature on usability and user experience compared with information systems deployed in most other industries. As electronic gaming machines (EGMs), emulating mechanical slot machines, epitomize the category of electronic gambling equipment in longest real-life service at casinos, this article evaluates gamblers'/users' perception of EGMs' usability and user experience in a broad sense. Augmenting the prime constructs of the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) with the additional construct "trust" and adopting the construct operationalization commonly applied to them in the literature, such constructs as "perceived ease of use", "perceived usefulness", "perceived risk" (RISK), "attitude" (ATTD), "social influence" (SI), "innovativeness" (INNOVA), "stress to use a technology" (STRESS) and "trust" (TR) in respect of EGMs were rated by n = 694 respondents in a questionnaire survey conducted in late 2022 in Macao. Paired-samples t -tests were employed to pairwise compare the ratings of these constructs. It was found that of all these constructs, RISK's mean ratings were the lowest and ATTD's the highest. In other words, relative to other usability and user experience perspectives of existing EGMs' designs, risk prevention or its presentation to the gamblers/users fell most short of expectation, and the gamblers'/users' attitude towards EGMs was most outstanding. In conclusion, this article advises that risk prevention be prioritized for amelioration, and gamblers'/users' attitude towards EGMs is most preferably to be maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article integrates the exposure and adaptation hypotheses concerning gambling engagement by quantitatively modeling, at the community level, the non-linear relationship between gamblers' engagement and their years of gambling experience and identifies the years of experience corresponding to the maximum/minimum engagement. Gambling engagement indicators were based on the odds of three metrics concerning casino visits, gambling budgets, and gambling affordability being beyond predefined thresholds. Empirical data were collected offline and online (n = 206 and 481) in Macao. Curve fitting of these indicators against gamblers' years of experience found that the odds of casino visit frequency being less than daily and the gambling budget being greater than both the first and second quartiles followed up-maximum-down quadratic curves over gamblers' experience. Their maxima were at around 13.3, 22.0, and 22.4 years, respectively. In conclusion, these indicators are non-linearly and bi-directionally related to gamblers' years of experience as per the aforesaid curves, i.e. the two hypotheses take turns to prevail over gamblers' lives and are thus integrated temporally. Unprecedentedly, such curves quantitatively model and quantify the timing, magnitude, maximization, and minimization of these indicators' variations over gamblers' lives, which matter to governments, the public, therapeutic/rehabilitative professionals, and gambling operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study modeled the general relationship between individual Macao adolescents' universal human values, measured by the Schwartz Values Inventory, and their problem/pathological gambling, indicated by the South Oaks Gambling Screen, using parsimonious, quantitative structural equation modeling. Data were collected through 471 questionnaires (261 females and 210 males) in 2010. Of the 10 value types in the Schwartz Values Inventory and derived value subtypes, only the human value subtype 'nonfaith tradition' was found to be (negatively) related to problem/pathological gambling in the model. The corresponding factor loading was −0.07 ( p = .015). This study was supported by the Education and Youth Affairs Bureau, the Government of Macao. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article derives statistical models relating adolescents’ universal human values with their problem and pathological gambling. An adolescent's values are measured by the priority accorded to each value using the Schwartz Values Inventory, whereas problem or pathological gambling, if any, is indicated by his or her answers to the South Oaks Gambling Screen. Among other complex results, statistical analysis suggests that the value subtypes of “non-faith tradition,” “faith tradition,” and “macro-universalism” and the value type “stimulation” are associated with less problem and pathological gambling. Among other uses, such findings help identify high-risk adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: Macao has long been a typical entertainment (especially, gaming) tourism city in the Asia-Pacific region. Sparked by the collapse of United States’ subprime mortgage securities in 2007, a global financial crisis swept through the global financial markets and economy in the several subsequent years. Macao''s entertainment tourism industry was not spared. This paper attempts to construct a financial engineering model to link Macao''s gross entertainment revenue with the key performance indicators of the global financial markets over these years. Results reveal that Macao''s entertainment tourism industry closely correlated with the performance of the global financial markets, with the former lagging behind by two months in a specific manner. This model may provide Macao and other entertainment tourism cities with forecasts for strategic planning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]