Many jurisdictions carry out surveys to estimate gambling participation rates and the prevalence of problem gambling. Official reports on survey results typically display, for each form of gambling, either prevalence information (the proportion of participants who are problem gamblers) or participation information (the proportion of problem gamblers who take part in that activity). Activity specific prevalence rates are driven primarily by how popular the form of gambling is with the general population and are a poor guide to how much gambling harm may be generated. Lobbyists use ‘low’ prevalence rates to argue for lighter touch regulation of their part of the gambling industry even though their customers may include a high proportion of the population of problem gamblers. Attention to participation information rather than prevalence information should be encouraged as this can signal potentially significant harm even in apparently benign activities and shows where in the gambling industry it is possible to reach out to the largest numbers of problem gamblers.

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The COVID-19 pandemic not only has caused serious harm to the lives, property, and health around the world, but also shattered different segments of the gambling industry. In the first five months of 2020, China’s lottery sales were 90.33 billion yuan, and dropped by 87.499 billion yuan when compared with the same period last year, with a decrease of 49.2%. To accurately understand the impact of major public health emergencies on gambling behaviour and explore the possibility of new types of gambling to reverse the decline of the gambling industry, we recruited 2,227 participants from mainland China in August 2019, and 2,222 participants in August 2020 after the COVID-19 outbreak to investigate and analyze their willingness to accept new types of gambling. The results showed: male participants were more willing to accept new types of gambling than female participants; older participants were more willing to accept new types of gambling; compared to that before the outbreak, participants were more willing to accept new types of gambling after the outbreak, but the risk level associated with the participant’[KG-*3]s location did not have a significant effect on their willingness to accept new types of gambling. These findings not only have helped to deepen our understanding of their gambling behaviour, but also provided useful inspiration and guidance for the gambling industry and government departments to respond to the global pandemic.

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Flow Theory, proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, refers to a state of complete immersion in an activity that people might be oblivious to the world around them and lose track of time, and approach an optimal state of experience that usually increases their sense of well being. As a result of an aging social population, the number and proportion of the elderly continues to grow, so their leisure and sense of well being is an issue of concern. Based on the Flow Theory, this paper summarized the dimensional model and distinguishing characteristics to analyze the psychological experience and sense of well being when the elderly was engaged in different leisure activities to explore how Macao can use the Flow Theory to develop the social gaming market for the elderly. This study has some practical significance in the improved well being derived from leisure activities, as well as Macao’s development of the leisure and recreational market for the elderly.

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This article is based on a literature search through primary academic literature databases for documents that dwell on gambling addiction and/or Internet addiction, with a view to exploring any multidimensional, multidisciplinary and generalizable association and commonality between these two addictive behaviours that are generally believed to exist. For each document thus found, the author analysed the authoritative category classification of the publication in which the document was published, the dimension(s)/discipline(s) explicitly manifested in the document’s content, and the explicit dimension/discipline orientation(s) of the publication in which the document was published so as to categorise the document’s own dimension(s)/discipline(s). The geographical coverage and/or the cohort of the research data and case studies underlying each document was further determined by analysing the document’s content. The aim is to corroborate that the aforementioned association and commonality are more than single facetted and parochial but are indeed multidimensional, multidisciplinary and generalizable. Finally, this article puts forward the implications of the aforementioned association and commonality in both academic and applied perspectives.

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The paper started with the characteristics of M&A transactions and the lottery industry. It analyzed and evaluated the corporate social responsibility performance after the M&A integration. It used the literature review, event study method, and BP neural network to analyze the M&A transactions of Tabcorp’s takeover of Tatts in the Australia lottery business, leading to an obvious positive social responsibility performance. The conclusion showed that in the lottery industry, the M&A of lottery operators could effectively improve their ability on social responsibility performance, as well as provide certain references for the M&A of lottery operators.

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The social science community has never stopped paying attention to the problem of technological unemployment. In order to explore the current situation of robot applications in hotels, how the applications of hotel robots would lead to technological unemployment, the hotel attitude towards technological unemployment, and the measures that should be taken, this study investigated 18 five star hotels in the Guangdong Hong Kong Macao Great Bay Area. The results showed that most of the surveyed hotels had not used robots, and were cautious about robot applications. Although robots could replace human employees in standardized, programmed, and repetitive work, organizations still needed human employees to complete humanized and personalized services. The surveyed hotels believed that technological unemployment caused by robot applications would exist to a certain extent without excessive worry. This study clarified the relationship between hotel robot applications and technological unemployment and the role positioning of hotel robots, and explored various factors affecting hotel robot applications, which are conducive to the follow up research. This study provided reference, human employees’ response to the hotel robot applications, and suggestions for the research and development and applications of hotel robots.

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This paper studied and summarized the important literature of gaming tourism over the past thirty years. Taking Macao as an example, discussions were conducted from the perspective of consumer travel motivation, gaming tourism recovery products, and the legal information framework constructed by the society. On the basis of the existing literature, this paper mainly discussed the feasibility, effectiveness and necessity of gaming tourism development. It further discussed the research direction of gaming tourism in the post epidemic era in the context of sudden major public health issues, especially in the change of consumer travel motivation, innovation of casino recovery products, and new research ideas in the deconstruction and construction of gambling legality.

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Reference groups have an important influence on consumers’ decision making. Such influence can be divided into three types: informational, utilitarian, and value expressive. Previous studies have shown that many factors such as self confidence, interpersonal disposition and complex goods have a moderating effect on the reference group influence. This research focused on the reference group influence on the shopping decision of tourism consumers. This study adopted the regression analysis to study the three types of reference group influence on the tourism consumers’ shopping intention, as well as the moderating effect of perceived complexity and tourist characteristics on such intention. The tourist characteristics were composed of tourism experience, tourism shopping experience and their satisfaction with shopping experience. The result shows that while the three types of reference group influence have a positive effect on the tourist’ s shopping intention of tourism goods, both perceived complexity and tourist characteristics have a moderating effect on the relationship between the reference group influence and their shopping intention. With the addition of the tourist familiarity variable, the effect of value expression on the tourist’ s shopping intention is not significant. This study shows that the reference group is of great significance to the study of tourism shopping, and provides the direction for setting regulatory variables in related research.

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Literature measurement and visual analytic tools were applied to literature and journal data as a means of statistical analysis to mine abundant literature and its hidden information to identify research hotspots and cutting edge dynamics. SATI online analysis software and CiteSpace were utilized to conduct a quantitative analysis of literature related to tourism carbon emission in the CNKI database. Based on such knowledge graphs as the keyword clustering maps, timeline graphs and thematic graphs, this paper identified hotspot issues, tracked research trends and detected the room in research associated with China’[KG-*4]s tourism carbon emission in recent years. The findings showed that: research in China has experienced a shift from qualitative description to quantitative measurement, from the initial concept analysis and case studies to model revision and large scale spatial analysis in recent years; the decoupling analysis during the time interval of the search continued to rise and the cooccurrence of keywords clearly indicated that the decoupling theory has become an important supporting theory in the field of tourism related carbon emission research; and in the past three years, the emerging tourism related carbon emission accounting has been characterized by multidisciplinary research with inputs from environmental economics and ecological economics.

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