The effect of a mandatory play break on subsequent gambling behavior among British online casino players: a large-scale real-world study

Auer, M and Griffiths, MD ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8880-6524, 2022. The effect of a mandatory play break on subsequent gambling behavior among British online casino players: a large-scale real-world study. Journal of Gambling Studies. ISSN 1050-5350

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Abstract

In recent years, various novel responsible gambling (RG) tools have been implemented to aid harm-minimization. One such RG tool has been the implementation of enforced mandatory play breaks. Despite many responsible gambling operators using mandatory play breaks, only three previous studies have examined their efficacy and the findings were mixed. Therefore, the present investigation was a large-scale real-world study which was designed to see whether a 60-minute mandatory play break influenced subsequent depositing and wagering. The authors were given access to 27 days of player data prior to the introduction of a mandatory play break and 27 days of player data after the mandatory play break was introduced. The study comprised British online gamblers from Skillonnet (a European online gambling operator). Between July 23 and September 15 (2021), 2,021 players deposited at least ten times or more on a calendar day, at least once. The 2,201 players generated 2,994 corresponding events (i.e., the depositing of money at least 10 times in one day). The percentage of players who stopped depositing money as a consequence of the mandatory play break rose from 27% to 68% on the day of a play break. Moreover, the percentage of players who stopped wagering as a consequence of the mandatory play break rose from 0.1% to 45% on the day of a play break. The findings of the present study demonstrated that a 60-minute mandatory play break impacts players’ depositing and wagering immediately after the play break. This means that a mandatory hour-long play break in an online casino setting appears to prevent overspending during a short period of time. The effects of a 60-minute mandatory break on the next day’s behavior were inconclusive.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Journal of Gambling Studies
Creators:	Auer, M. and Griffiths, M.D.
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date:	15 March 2022
ISSN:	1050-5350
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1007/s10899-022-10113-x DOI 1525497 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2022. 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:	15 Mar 2022 12:05
Last Modified:	15 Mar 2022 12:05
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/45892

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