This study investigates the nature and behaviour of illegal gamblers in Hong Kong. A face-to-face street survey of 512 gamblers was conducted in Hong Kong between September and December 2015 with supplementary convenience sampling allowing for analysis of a total sample of 103 illegal gamblers. 56% of illegal gamblers recorded results consistent with this study's definition of 'excessive gambli...

Dr. Pier Vincenzo Piazza: Addiction is a vague concept that is generally used to define a pathological drug taking. There are different levels of severity of this pathological behavior. The mild condition is mostly characterized by an escalation in drug intake that goes from a sporadic recreational drug use to a more sustained and regular drug intake. This behavior starts becoming a problem for...

Physicians and other health care professionals seem well placed to play a role in the monitoring and, perhaps, in the curtailment of the trafficking in human beings for the purpose of organ removal. They serve as important sources of information for patients and may have access to information that can be used to gain a greater understanding of organ trafficking networks. However, well-establish...

This paper concentrates on both the positive and normative effects of punishments that enforce laws to make production and consumption of particular goods illegal, with illegal drugs as the main example. Optimal public expenditures on apprehension and conviction of illegal suppliers obviously depend on the extent of the difference between the social and private value of consumption of illegal g...

Although illegal markets have considerable economic significance and are of theoretical importance, they have been largely ignored by economic sociology. In the first part of this article, we propose a categorization for illegal markets. In the second part, the structural characteristics of illegal markets are described along the three coordination problems of valuation, competition and coopera...