This study provides a systematic analysis of the VIP-room contractual system of Macau’s traditional casino industry. It examines the system’s historical background, its organizational structure, its operational mechanisms, and its role in Macau’s casino industry. This analysis examines the evolving and likely future changes in the VIP-room sector—as well as the mass market sector—caused by the ...

This paper discusses how model checking, a technique used for the verification of behavioural requirements of dynamic systems, can be usefully deployed for the verification of contracts. A process view of agreements between parties is taken, whereby a contract is modelled as it evolves over time in terms of actions or more generally events that effect changes in its state. Modelling is done wit...

One influential approach to assessing the"goodness"of arguments is offered by the Pragma-Dialectical school (p-d) (Eemeren&Grootendorst 1992). This can be compared with Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann&Thompson 1988), an approach that originates in discourse analysis. In p-d terms an argument is good if it avoids committing a fallacy, whereas in RST terms an argument is good if it is coh...

A Web-based multi purpose contractual management system can provide support to contractual process workflows for different types of contractual process of unilateral, bilateral or multilateral contracts. These processes can be done on-line i.e. Web-based without the need for all actors to be synchronously present with respect to both time and space. Different contractual processes of initializa...

The need to use position-dependent parameters often hampers the definition of flexible, extensible, and reusable abstractions for software composition. This observation has led us to explore the concept of forms, which are first-class extensible records and that, in combination with a small set of purely asymmetric operators, provide a core language to address this issue. One interesting applic...

Small firms are thought to encounter various difficulties implementing strategic alliances. Due to these problems, they may be less able to reap the benefits of alliance adaptation, and the changes that occur in alliances over time often will not coincide with the small firm’s interests. The evidence we present on contractual renegotiations in alliances suggests that small firms are no more or ...

In this position paper we discuss the issue of enforcing access policies in distributed environments where there is no central system designer/administrator, and consequently no guarantee that policies will be properly implemented by all components of the system. We argue that existing access control models, which are based on the concepts of permission and prohibition, need to be extended with...

BACKGROUND Socioeconomic status is strongly associated with obesity. Current economic circumstances are also independently associated with self-reported weight status in Finnish civil servants. We aimed to examine three types of financial hardship in relation to measured general and central obesity in a general population of older adults, while considering conventional socioeconomic indicators....