The relationship between structural characteristics and gambling behaviour: an online gambling player tracking study

Auer, M and Griffiths, MD ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8880-6524, 2023. The relationship between structural characteristics and gambling behaviour: an online gambling player tracking study. Journal of Gambling Studies, 39, pp. 265-279. ISSN 1050-5350

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Abstract

Structural characteristics of games have been regarded as important aspects in the possible development of problematic gambling. The most important factors along with individual susceptibility and risk factors of the individual gambler are the structural characteristics such as the speed and frequency of the game (and more specifically event frequency, bet frequency, event duration, and payout interval). To date, the association between structural characteristics and behavior has not been studied in an online gambling environment. The present study investigated the association between structural characteristics and online gambling behavior in an ecologically valid setting using data from actual gamblers. The authors were given access to data from a large European online gambling operator with players from Germany, Austria, UK, Poland, and Slovenia. The sample comprised 763,490 sessions between November 27, 2020 and April 15, 2021 utilizing data from 43,731 players. A machine learning tree-based algorithm with structural characteristics and session metrics explained 26% of the variance of the number of games played in a session. The results also showed that only 7.7% of the variance in the number of bets placed in a session was explained by the game’s structural characteristics alone. The most important structural characteristic with respect to the number of games played in a session was the event frequency of the game followed by the maximum amount won on a single bet in a session.

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:	March 2023
Volume:	39
ISSN:	1050-5350
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1007/s10899-022-10115-9 DOI 1545635 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2022. 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:	Laura Ward
Date Added:	13 May 2022 14:33
Last Modified:	07 Mar 2023 16:32
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/46319

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