Search

We study whether and how time preferences explain preferences for conditional risk sequences spaced out in time, controlling for risk and sequence preferences. Our participants will make repeated choices, spaced in real time, between conditional probabilities of winning money, mirroring the temporal structure of some important real-world probability distributions. They will also answer additional questions revealing their risk, time and sequence preferences, and questions that reveal their combined risk/sequence and time/sequence preferences. The main research questions are based on the choices made in session 1, with later sessions conducted for two purposes: to incentivise the session 1 responses, and to allow us to explore consistency of implied preferences across sessions.

Rationale Previous research found that displaying variations of the “when the fun stops, stop” during an incentivized online gambling session had no effect on the proportion of available funds bet (Newall et al., 2022). These findings cast doubt on the efficacy of that particular safer gambling message. In recent months the UK’s Betting and Gaming Council unveiled a new safer gambling message intended to replace when the fun stops, stop: “take time to think”. The present work will perform a similar evaluation of the take time to think message with the online roulette paradigm from the previous work, with a few design improvements. The primary goal of the current work is to evaluate whether the “Take Time to Think” safer gambling message leads to a change in concurrent gambling behaviour on an online roulette task. We will compare the proportion of funds that people bet when presented with either no message or the “Take Time to Think” message in two formats: as a banner or as a pop-up message. In the previous study (Newall et al., 2022), although the safer gambling messages were displayed prominently on screen during the gambling task’s instructions and during the task itself, participants may not have been sufficiently aware of the message for it to affect their behavior. Previous research suggests that “pop-up” messages, displayed in the center of the screen and which must be clicked in order to proceed with gambling, are the most effective at shaping behavior (Monaghan, 2009). Therefore, the present research will have three conditions: (i) no message (control condition), (ii) message only on-screen, and (iii) pop-up on initiation of the gambling session, plus message on-screen throughout. In addition, safer gambling messages might have no immediate effect on gambling behavior, but might have other influences on gamblers. To assess such other impacts, the present work will provide participants with an informational page directly after the gambling task, which gives an overview of the support provider GamCare’s services and a button that can be clicked that will take participants to the GamCare website upon completion of the study. Rates of clicking on that button will be compared between groups. In addition to the proportion bet or participants' interest in visiting the GamCare website, the take time to think message might also affect gamblers speed of play. Therefore, the present research will also test the mean speed of play between any two spins on the roulette wheel in the two gambling message conditions compared to the no-message control condition. Finally, any change in speed of play may be offset by changes in the total session time. To better assess this possibility, we will also examine the total number of roulette spins made by participants.