Investing and gambling share key features, in that both involve risk, the coming together of two or more people, and both are voluntary activities. However, investing is generally a much better way than gambling for the average person to make long-run profits. This paper reviews evidence on two types of “gamblified” investment products where this advantage does not hold for investing: high-frequency stock trading and high-risk derivatives. This review defines a gamblified investment product as one that leads most investors to lose, that attracts people at risk of experiencing gambling-related harm, and that utilizes product design principles from gambling (either by encouraging a high frequency of use or by providing the allure of big lottery-like wins). The gamblification of investing produces novel challenges for the regulation of both financial markets and gambling.

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The Gamblification of Investing: How a New Generation of Investors Is Being Born to Lose

Problem gambling is a gambling disorder often described as continued gambling in the face of increasing losses. In this article, we explored problem gambling behaviour and its psychological determinants. We considered the assumption of stability in risky preferences, anticipated by both normative and descriptive theories of decision making, as well as recent evidence that risk preferences are in fact 'constructed on the fly' during risk elicitation. Accordingly, we argue that problem gambling is a multifaceted disorder, which is 'fueled on the fly' by a wide range of contextual and non-contextual influences, including individual differences in personality traits, hormonal and emotional activations. We have proposed that the experience of gambling behaviour in itself is a dynamic experience of events in time series, where gamblers anchor on the most recent event-typically a small loss or rare win. This is a highly adaptive, but erroneous, decision-making mechanism, where anchoring on the most recent event alters the psychological representations of substantial and accumulated loss in the past to a representation of negligible loss. In other words, people feel better while they gamble. We conclude that problem gambling researchers and policy makers will need to employ multifaceted and holistic approaches to understand problem gambling.

Problem Gambling 'Fuelled on the Fly'.

Background and aims Online sports wagering is a popular and still growing gambling activity around the world. Like other types of gambling, it can lead to problems that include devastating financial, social, and health-related harms. The first analysis of actual online sports wagering activity (LaBrie et al., 2007) suggested that levels of financial and time involvement were more moderate than anticipated from earlier self-report studies. However, these findings are now more than a decade old. Methods The current study examined actual online sports wagering activity of a similar cohort of 32,262 gamblers who subscribed to a European online betting platform in February 2015 to understand how sports betting might have changed in ten years. Measures included subscriber characteristics, betting activities, and transactional activities. Results Players placed a median of 15 bets during the 8-month study period, made a median of 2.5 bets per betting day, had a median bet size of 6.1 euros, and experienced a median net loss of 25 euros. We were able to distinguish highly involved bettors in the top 2% of total wagered, net loss, and number of bets, whose behavior differed from that of the rest of the sample. Discussion and conclusions Sports wagering behavior has remained relatively stable over time despite legislative changes and an increase in popularity, with a small subset of subscribers exhibiting disproportionately high engagement, transactional activity, and in-game betting. Further investigation of individual trajectories of wagering behavior and engagement with different types of sports wagering products is merited.

https://akjournals.com/downloadpdf/journals/2006/aop/article-10.1556-2006.2021.00029/article-10.1556-2006.2021.00029.pdf

Changes to the playing field: A contemporary study of actual European online sports betting

Social media enables a range of possibilities in the way gamblers and gambling operators interact and content communicate with gambling. The purpose of this systematic review was to synthesise the extant literature to identify the ways in which social media has been investigated in the context of gambling. A systematic review of the literature identified 41 papers that collected primary data pertinent to gambling and social media from multiple disciplines. These papers broadly fell into three themes: communication, community and calculation (of sentiment). Papers on communication focused on the content of gambling advertising on social media and the impact on people exposed to it. Studies of gambling communities studied the activity and structures of discussion groups on social media concerning recreational or problematic gambling. Papers on calculation collated social media data to assess sentiment and compared it against betting odds. There is an emerging multidisciplinary literature that has looked at the use of social media in relation to gambling. There is preliminary evidence that the content and the reach of gambling advertising on social media is a source of concern, particularly for younger people. The themes discussed on gambling support forums appear to be common across communities, focusing on negative emotions, recovery, addictive products and financial support. Using social media to assess sentiment appears to be particularly effective at identifying potential upsets in sporting matches. Future suggestions for research are explored.

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The use of social media in research on gambling: a systematic review

Tilting is a poker-related phenomenon that involves cognitive and emotional dysregulation in response to unfavourable gambling outcomes. Tilting is characterised by an increase in irrational, impulsive and strategically weak betting decisions. This study aimed to adapt and investigate the concept of tilting amongst sport bettors in order to provide preliminary insight regarding previously unexplored instances of maladaptive sports betting. The sample consisted of 225 sports bettors who completed an online questionnaire that investigated their reported tilting episodes, awareness of tilting, impulsivity, perceived skill, gambling severity, gambling frequency, and product preferences. Cluster analyses revealed three distinct groups of sports bettors based on their reported tilting episodes and their awareness of this phenomenon. The first group were labelled ‘Conscious tilters’ due to being cognizant of their own tilting occurrence which was significantly higher than the other two groups. These ‘Conscious tilters’ had the highest mean problem gambling severity that was indicative of the ‘problem gambler’ categorisation. The second group were labelled ‘Unconscious tilters’ due to their underestimation of their own tilting occurrence and were categorised as ‘moderate risk gamblers’. The third group were labelled ‘Non-tilters’ due to a relatively accurate perception of their low to non-existent tilting occurrence and were categorised as ‘low-risk gamblers’. Additionally, there were significant differences between these groups in relation to reported gambling frequency, impulsivity, and product preferences. There is evidence of various classifications of ‘tilters’ within sports betting. Specific sports betting product features may also facilitate tilting and therefore require further research in this context. It is important for this research area to develop in order to mitigate harms associated with the rapidly changing sport betting environment.

Conceptualising emotional and cognitive dysregulation amongst sports bettors; an exploratory study of ‘tilting’ in a new context

Background and aims
Request-a-bet services are a modern gambling product delivered via the social network Twitter, which allow sports bettors to design custom bets. The public nature of Twitter data provided a unique opportunity to investigate patterns of bettor preference and the bookmaker profit margin in soccer, the UK’s favorite sport.

Methods
Two multi-method studies. Twitter users’ engagement with request-a-bet services was monitored unobtrusively (n = 1,406), meaning that potential patterns across users’ requests could be observed, and the bookmaker profit margin could be estimated. Twitter users were also surveyed directly (n = 55), providing self-report measures of request-a-bet usage.

Results
Twitter users requested bets with an average potential payoff of £56.5 per £1 risked (median = £9). Overall, 9.7% of requested bets paid-off, but these were mostly bets at short odds. This meant that requests yielded a high bookmaker profit margin of 43.7% (roughly eight times higher than current margins in conventional soccer bets), which increased to 74.6% for bets at longer odds. Requested bets also tended to involve star players from the best teams. Finally, 92.7% of surveyed Twitter users reported placing at least one bet via request-a-bet services (mean = 44.4 bets).

Discussion and conclusions
Researchers can use request-a-bet products to increase their understanding of sports betting behavior. Sports bettors should be given information about how much higher the bookmaker profit margin can be in modern sports bets compared to the conventional sports bets that they may be more familiar with.

https://akjournals.com/downloadpdf/journals/2006/aop/article-10.1556-2006.2020.00054/article-10.1556-2006.2020.00054.pdf

Rebecca Vázquez Kiesel

Papers

Request-a-bet sports betting products indicate patterns of bettor preference and bookmaker profits.