Gambling before and during the COVID-19 pandemic among European regular sports bettors: an empirical study using behavioral tracking data

Auer, M, Malischnig, D and Griffiths, MD ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8880-6524, 2023. Gambling before and during the COVID-19 pandemic among European regular sports bettors: an empirical study using behavioral tracking data. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 21 (1), pp. 20-27. ISSN 1557-1874

Preview

Text 1329534_Griffiths.pdf - Published version Download (288kB) | Preview

Abstract

The novel coronavirus-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had major impacts on most societies worldwide including the cancelation and postponement of sports events. This has had a major impact on the sports betting industry. The present study is first to investigate the behavior of a sample of online sports bettors before and after COVID-19 measures were put in place by European governments. The authors were given access to the player data by a large European online gambling operator comprising players from Sweden, Germany, Finland, and Norway. The behavioral change of the sports bettors before March 7 and after March 7 (2020) was computed. All sports bettors who placed at least one wager in at least 5 calendar weeks out of the 10 possible calendar weeks between January 1 and March 7 (n = 5396) were included in the analysis. Results showed statistically significant reductions among sports bettors wagering in online casinos. This indicates that there was no conversion of money spent from sports betting to online casino games, at least for this particular online gambling operator. The findings suggest that there was a significant decrease in the amount of money wagered by sports bettors during the COVID-19 pandemic (compared with before it) and that sports bettors did not switch to playing more online casino games and that there was also a significant reduction in playing online casino games among sports bettors.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction
Creators:	Auer, M., Malischnig, D. and Griffiths, M.D.
Publisher:	Springer
Date:	February 2023
Volume:	21
Number:	1
ISSN:	1557-1874
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1007/s11469-020-00327-8 DOI 1329534 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2020. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	01 Jun 2020 09:50
Last Modified:	10 Feb 2023 11:35
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/39914

Actions (login required)

Edit View

Statistics

Views

Downloads