Title: Second Session at the Virtual Poker Table

PIs: Drs. Debi A. LaPlante and Sarah E. Nelson

Sponsor: Entain plc

Description: This package contains the data and code used for a study of a cohort of online poker players and their activity on an online poker server (Tom et al., 2022). The files contain demographic information and records of deposit, withdrawal, and poker activity for subscribers who first opened an account with one of Entain’s gambling services in February 2015.

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Title: Population Trends in Internet Sports Gambling

PI: Dr. Howard J. Shaffer

Sponsor: bwin Interactive Entertainment AG

Description: This package contains the analytic data set for the first longitudinal analysis of online gambling participation and activity among a population of newly subscribed Internet bettors (LaPlante et al., 2008). This data set comes from the collaborative Internet gambling research project between the Division on Addictions (DOA) and bwin Interactive Entertainment, AG (bwin) (currently known as the Division on Addiction and Entain plc, respectively). This data set contains demographics and sports betting records of a cohort of 46,339 subscribers who first opened an account with bwin during February 2005. The records represent 18 months of activity, starting on February 1, 2005 and ending on August 31, 2006.

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Title: Patterns of Daily Fantasy Sports Play: Tackling the Issues

PIs: Drs. Debi A. LaPlante and Sarah E. Nelson

Sponsor: DraftKings, Inc.

Description: Daily fantasy sports (DFS), a rapidly growing industry, allows players to create fantasy teams of real-life players and potentially win cash prizes, derived from entry fees. Some stakeholders have expressed concern that DFS's accelerated nature and other features might promote excessive play and related harm. We conducted the first descriptive summary of actual DFS play using records from a cohort of subscribers to a dominant operator, DraftKings. The cohort consisted of 10,385 players who enrolled and made their initial deposits between August 1, 2014 and September 30, 2014, and entered at least one paid National Football League (NFL) contest.

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Title: A Scoping Review of "Responsible Drinking" Interventions

PIs: Drs. Heather M. Gray and Howard J. Shaffer

Sponsor: Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility (FAAR)

Description: Public health groups, researchers, the beverage alcohol industry, and other stakeholders have promoted and applied the concept of "responsible drinking" for the past 50 years. However, little is known about the state of the existing responsible drinking evaluation research and its application to policy and practice. This project provides a scoping review of studies evaluating responsible drinking interventions. Two primary research questions guided this investigation: (1) To what extent have authors attempted to define the concept of responsible drinking while evaluating responsible drinking interventions? and (2) What is the state of the responsible drinking intervention evaluation literature? We retrieved 49 peer-reviewed articles that evaluated interventions designed to promote "responsible drinking."

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Title: Understanding the Relation Between Social Behaviors and Daily Fantasy Sports Risk Behavior

PIs: Drs. Howard J. Shaffer and Debi A. LaPlante

Sponsor: DraftKings, Inc.

Description: In daily fantasy sports (DFS) contests, participants form a roster of athletes scheduled to perform in a pre-determined list of sporting contests or games. Each participant has the opportunity to win cash prizes, depending on the performance of the athletes on their roster and the performances of the athletes on the other participants' rosters. Some contests have higher variances than others (i.e., lower percentages of participants winning and higher payouts versus higher percentages of participants winning and lower payouts) and can be considered riskier propositions. DFS operators have mechanisms for interacting with friends on their servers (e.g., referral programs and incentives, friend lists, private contests). To determine whether use of these mechanisms (i.e., social behavior) was associated with preference for higher variance contests (i.e., risk behavior), we analyzed player records (N = 11,130) from a DFS service. We constructed a measure of risk behavior, player risk score, that is based on DFS contests' entry fees and payout structures.

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Title: Observations of the First GameSense-branded Responsible Gambling Centre in a US casino

PIs: Drs. Howard J. Shaffer and Debi A. LaPlante

Sponsor: Massachusetts Gaming Commission

Description: Casino operators are launching responsible gambling information centers in venues across North America. These centers are designed to provide a place where casino customers can get information about gambling and resources for help with potential gambling problems. The launch of the first such center in the USA, the GameSense Info Center, located at Plainridge Park Casino, in Massachusetts provided an opportunity to achieve three goals: (1) document the center reach among casino patrons, (2) generate a comprehensive description of services provided, and (3) explore the potential for a dose response relationship between center exposure and gambling beliefs and behavior. We achieved these goals by documenting services provided and surveying consecutive center visitors. Program staff reported engaging directly with approximately 1% of daily patrons. About 70% of their interactions were casual in nature. During conversations that did move beyond a casual nature, program staff typically provided information about responsible gambling. Finally, among a sample of patrons who repeatedly engaged with program staff at the most involved level (N = 129), those with relatively little program exposure were more likely to hold an accurate gambling belief but less likely to report having set time limits on their casino visits. In conclusion, we did not observe support for the notion that using an on-site information center to teach patrons about important gambling concepts is associated with more responsible gambling behavior.

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Title: Examining Responsible Gambling Program Awareness and Engagement Trends

PI: Dr. Brett Abarbanel (subcontract PI: Dr. Heather Gray)

Sponsor: MGM Resorts International

Description: A considerable body of literature has examined elements of responsible gambling (RG) programs in land-based gambling venues. We examined GameSense RG program awareness and engagement trends and relationships with gambling beliefs and behaviors, at MGM's U.S.-based casino properties using three samples of MGM's loyalty program members. We used a repeated cross-sectional approach including observational data collected from one sample (N = 3748) shortly before the rollout of GameSense in 2017-2018, and from two samples collected 1 year (N = 4795) and 2 years (N = 3927) after the program's implementation.

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Title: Responsible gambling: A synthesis of the empirical evidence

Source: Peer reviewed journal articles included in: (Ladouceur et al. in Addict Res Theory 25:225-235, 2017)

PI: Dr. Robert Ladouceur

Sponsor: Laval University

Description: This codebook provides information about the data used to generate statistics for a recent study that examined the relationship between funding sources and scientific findings within the extant responsible gambling literature (Ladouceur, Robert & Shaffer, Paige & Blaszczynski, Alex & Shaffer, Howard (2018). Responsible Gambling Research and Industry Funding Biases. Journal of Gambling Studies. 10.1007/s10899-018-9792-9.) Specifically, this study examined whether there are different characteristics, including design/methodologies of responsible gambling (RG), between studies funded by industry compared to other sources. To investigate this hypothesis, the authors used those studies included in a recent meta-analysis focusing on the empirical basis of RG initiatives (Ladouceur et al. in Addiction Research and Theory 25:225-235, 2017). This data set includes the 29 studies included in the final wave of the meta-analysis. All covariates used for analysis are included in the dataset.

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Title: Associations between national gambling policies and disordered gambling prevalence rates within Europe

Sources: Division on Addiction, Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital; University of St. Gallen HSG

PI: Simon Planzer, Ph.D., M.A.

Sponsor: bwin Digital Entertainment AG

Description: This codebook provides information for both the raw and analytic datasets used to generate analyses of the associations between national gambling policies and disordered gambling prevalence rates within Europe (Planzer, Gray, & Shaffer, 2014). These datasets come from the collection of national gambling policy data from key informants and the collection of disordered gambling prevalence estimates from a review of the literature.

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Title: Using Cross-game Behavioral Markers for Early Identification of High-risk Internet Gamblers

Source: Division on Addiction, Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital

PI: Dr. Howard J. Shaffer

Sponsor: bwin Interactive Entertainment AG

Description: BACKGROUND: Using actual gambling behavior provides the opportunity to develop behavioral markers that operators can use to predict the development of gambling-related problems among their subscribers.
METHODS: Participants were 4,056 Internet gamblers who subscribed to the Internet betting service provider bwin.party. Half of this sample included multiple platform gamblers who were identified by bwin.party's Responsible Gambling (RG) program; the other half were controls randomly selected from those who had the same first deposit date. Using the daily aggregated Internet betting transactions for gamblers' first 31 calendar days of online betting activities at bwin.party, we employed a 2-step analytic strategy: (1) applying an exploratory chi-squared automatic interaction detection (CHAID) decision tree method to identify characteristics that distinguished a subgroup of high-risk Internet gamblers from the rest of the sample, and (2) conducting a confirmatory analysis of those characteristics among an independent validation sample. RESULTS: This analysis identified two high-risk groups (i.e., groups in which 90% of the members were identified by bwin.party's RG program): Group 1 engaged in 3 or more gambling activities and evidenced high wager variability on casino-type games; Group 2 engaged in 2 different gambling activities and evidenced high variability for live action wagers.
CONCLUSION: This analysis advances an ongoing research program to identify potentially problematic Internet gamblers during the earliest stages of their Internet gambling. Gambling providers and public policy makers can use these results to inform early intervention programs that target high-risk Internet gamblers.

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Title: Behavioral characteristics of Internet gamblers who trigger corporate responsible gambling interventions

Source: Division on Addiction, Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital

PI: Dr. Howard J. Shaffer

Sponsor: bwin Interactive Entertainment AG

Description: As the worldwide popularity of Internet gambling increases, concerns about the potential for gambling-related harm also increase. This paper reports the results of a study examining actual Internet gambling behavior during 10 years of play. We examined the electronic gambling records of subscribers (N = 2,066) who triggered a responsible gaming alert system at a large international online gaming company. We compared these cases with control subscribers (N = 2,066) who had the same amount of exposure to the Internet gambling service provider. We used discriminant function analysis to explore what aspects of gambling behavior distinguish cases from controls. Indices of the intensity of gambling activity (e.g., total number of bets made, number of bets per betting day) best distinguished cases from controls, particularly in the case of live-action sports betting. Control group players evidenced behavior similar to the population of players using this service. These results add to our understanding of behavioral markers for disordered Internet gambling and will aid in the development of behavior-based algorithms capable of predicting the presence and/or the onset of disordered Internet gambling.

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Title: How Do Gamblers Start Gambling: Identifying Behavioural Markers for High-risk Internet Gambling

Source: Division on Addiction, Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital

PI: Dr. Howard J. Shaffer

Sponsor: bwin Interactive Entertainment AG

Description: BACKGROUND: The goal of this study is to identify betting patterns displayed during the first month of actual Internet gambling on a betting site that can serve as behavioural markers to predict the development of gambling-related problems.
METHODS: Using longitudinal data, k-means clustering analysis identified a small subgroup of high-risk gamblers.
RESULTS: Seventy-three percent of the members of this subgroup eventually closed their account due to gambling-related problems. The characteristics of this high-risk subgroup were as follows: (1) frequent and (2) intensive betting combined with (3) high variability across wager amount and (4) an increasing wager size during the first month of betting.
CONCLUSION: This analysis provides important information that can help to identify potentially problematic gamblers during the early stages of gambling-related problems. Public health workers can use these results to develop early interventions that target high-risk Internet gamblers for prevention efforts. However, one study limitation is that the results distinguish only a small proportion of the total sample. Therefore, additional research will be necessary to identify markers that can classify larger segments of high-risk gamblers.

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Title: Actual Internet Sports Gambling Activity: February 2005 through September 2005

Source: Division on Addiction, Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital

PI: Dr. Howard J. Shaffer

Sponsor: bwin Interactive Entertainment AG

Description: The first available dataset for the Transparency Project comes from the collaborative Internet gambling research project involving the Division and bwin Interactive Entertainment, AG. bwin, an Internet betting service provider headquartered in Vienna, Austria. The dataset provides the first prospective longitudinal data reflecting real-time Internet sports betting behavior. It contains the information from a large cohort of participants (N = 40,499) who opened an account with bwin from February 1, 2005 through February 27, 2005; this dataset also describes the actual aggregated Internet sports gambling behavior of participants during the first 8 months of a longitudinal study that took place from February 1, 2005 through September 30, 2005. This bwin Internet gambling dataset includes the following participant information: demographic information (user ID, country of residence, language, gender, registration date, age at registration), and fixed-odds and live-action betting activity (first active date, last active date, total days active, total stakes, total winnings, total bets).

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Title: Meta-analytic Prevalence Estimates of Disordered Gambling in the US & Canada

Source: Division on Addiction, Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital

PI: Dr. Howard J. Shaffer

Sponsor: National Center for Responsible Gaming

Description: This meta-analytic dataset extends the first comprehensive gambling related epidemiological meta-analysis published in the American Journal of Public Health in 1999 by Shaffer et al to update and refine the prevalence estimates of disordered gambling in the United States and Canada. This dataset employs an empirical strategy to synthesize estimates of gambling-related disorders across an array of differing estimation methodologies and population samples. This dataset provides the opportunity to evaluate and integrate the range of assumptions and strategies used by the various scientists who have estimated the prevalence of disordered gambling. This search strategy initially identified 193 prevalence studies and a total of 146 studies were included for analyses in this meta-analysis study.

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Title: Virtual Casino Gambling: February 2005 through February 2007

Source: Division on Addiction, Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital

PI: Dr. Howard J. Shaffer

Sponsor: National Center for Responsible Gaming

Description: The data includes two years of recorded Internet betting activity by a cohort of gamblers who subscribed to an Internet gambling service during February 2005. The sample included over 4,000 gamblers who played casino games. The available demographic characteristics of the research sample included age, gender, country of residence, and preferred language. The gambling behavior measures are based on participants' monetary deposits to, and withdrawals from, their wagering accounts, as well as daily aggregates of betting activity records. The daily betting aggregates include the number of bets made, total monies wagered, and winnings credited to the bettors' accounts. We measured the duration of gambling involvement as the number of days from the first eligible bet to the last (i.e., Duration).

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Title: Sitting at the Virtual Poker Table: February 2005 through February 2007

Source: Division on Addiction, Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital

PI: Dr. Howard J. Shaffer

Sponsor: National Center for Responsible Gaming

Description: This codebook provides information about the raw and analytic datasets that provided the evidence base for research focusing on actual Internet poker gambling (LaPlante et al., 2009). These datasets derive from the collaborative Internet gambling research project between the Division on Addictions (DOA) and bwin Interactive Entertainment, AG (bwin), an Internet betting service provider headquartered in Vienna, Austria. These datasets provide evidence from twenty-four months of the prospective longitudinal, real-time, Internet poker-playing behavior.
The datasets contain raw and analytic data representing twenty-four months of aggregated betting behavior data for sequential bwin subscribers who opened an account with bwin during the period from February 1, 2005 through February 28, 2005. The raw datasets RawDataSet1_DemographicsPoker and RawDataSet2_AggregatePoker represent data from 48,114 people (100% of people who subscribed during February 2005). Of the full cohort, 4,459 elected to play poker online. Of these, we excluded 951 participants who played fewer than four poker sessions during the study period and 63 poker players who did not begin poker play until the last month of the study period (i.e., began playing poker after January 31, 2007). The resulting sample, included in the analytic data set AnalyticDataSet_Poker, consists of the remaining 3,445 people who contributed data to the analyses reported in LaPlante et al. (2009).

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