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Fu, Hin-Ngai

University of British Columbia

The rise of online gambling has transformed the gambling environment by providing easier access to a wide variety of gambling products. While often marketed as entertainment, a subset of highly-engaged gamblers face significant harms. Research into online gambling has used customer data from gambling websites to track behaviors. Studies have shown that online gambling can be highly ‘concentrated’ among a small number of high-intensity gamblers, who also seem to experience gambling harm. This concentration can be operationalized as a Pareto estimate, i.e. the percentage of gambling activity that can be attributed to the top 20% of consumers. This thesis investigates these concentration effects using a dataset from the eCasino section of PlayNow.com, the provincial gambling website for British Columbia, Canada, spanning seven years from 2013 to 2019. The dataset includes nearly 5 billion bets from over 100,000 customers. The study had four main objectives: 1) to calculate Pareto estimates for different gambling product categories; 2) to analyze the stability of these estimates over time; 3) to examine the relationship between high-intensity gambling and Voluntary Self-Exclusion (VSE), as an indicator of gambling harms; 4) to assess how adding or removing low engagement customers affects Pareto estimates. The findings indicate that, across all products and years, Pareto estimates were 'hyper-Pareto,' with the top 20% of customers generating over 80% (typically around 90%) of revenue and bets. Although estimates varied by product category, they remained relatively stable within each category. Concentration estimates varied by product category, and remained relatively stable; slots were consistently the lowest, and highest for video poker. This ordering was reversed when considering the difference in VSE rates in the ‘vital few’ (top 20%) and ‘trivial many’ (bottom 80%): the top 20% of slots gamblers were 2-3 times more likely to have a VSE record than the bottom 80%, whereas video poker players were 1-1.5 times more likely. These results are interpreted in relation to the hypothesis that high Pareto estimates indicate ‘addictiveness’ of a gambling product, and these data raise some important challenges to this hypothesis.

Text

2024-08-27

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89052

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/