Online sports betting

Use of consumer protection tools by Australian sports wagerers

Clients

• A/Prof Sally Gainsbury, Brain & Mind Centre, University of Sydney
• Dr Robert Heirene, Brain & Mind Centre, University of Sydney

Purpose

• The clients have a partnership with Responsible Wagering Australia to provide experimental data for research.
• For this project, the questions were:
  1. What proportion of online sports wagerers use consumer protection tools (deposit limits, timeouts & self-exclusions)?
  2. What are the differences between wagerers who use each of the tool types?

Approach

• Integrated 12+ million online wagering transactions from 50 000 clients of 6 major online wagering operators. Engineered over 200 features for analysis.
• This revealed that mandatory vs opt-in deposit limits are likely to reduce the risk of harms.
• Created a visualisation for the tool use trajectory for ~3000 clients to enable data understanding and hypothesis generation, for the next work around understanding tool use patterns among users of multiple tools.

Outcome

• Co-authored the first academic publication regarding consumer protection tool use among sports wagerers in Australia.
• Contributed to a report for Responsible Wagering Australia.
• Study results were covered by multiple media outlets (see below links).

Links

• Academic manuscript: Heirene, R. M., Vanichkina, D. P., & Gainsbury, S. M. (2021). Patterns and correlates of consumer protection tool use by Australian online gambling customers. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/adb0000761

• Feature in Asia Gaming Brief

• Feature in GREO Evidence Centre (Canada)

• University of Sydney Publicity brief

• Code repository/website with results (Sydney Uni access only) ## Key tools

• R: data.table, tidyverse, Rmarkdown, lubridate, gtsummary, tidyquant, lmertest, broom; Git + GitHub.

Note: cover photo credit Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash