Impact of cash-out availability in a naturalistic betting task: A randomized experimental study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background and Aims: People place larger bets on outcomes of risky events when they can settle their bet earlier – i.e., they are allowed to cash-out before the bet concludes. Using a naturalistic gambling task, the present study aims to determine how the opportunity to cash-out impacts the decision to bet and to assess the underlying association between cash-out availability and risk of gambling harm.Design and setting: We conducted an incentivised between-participants online experiment, where participants could place fixed-odds bets on the outcomes of pre-recorded horse races via an interface resembling a commercial bookmaker’s website. Participants were randomly assigned to conditions in which the cash-out was either available or not available to them and were given the option to gamble an endowment that they had previously earned in a real-effort task.Cases: 377 participants with experience in online sports betting were recruited from online research participation platform Prolific. Measurements: The decision to engage with the gambling task was recorded at 3 points during the experimental session. Stake sizes and implied win probabilities of placed bets were recorded. Risk of gambling harms was measured by administering the PGSI.Results: People in the cash-out-available group were more likely to choose the gambling task over a distractor (non-gambling) game (χ²(1, N=377)=4.59, p=0.032) and made larger bets when wagering than those in the no-cash-out group (W=19761.5, p=0.021). There was no effect of the manipulation on the average odds of bets placed (W=10635.5, p=0.67). No significant interactions with PGSI were observed for either stake size (β=-0.02, SE=0.02, p=0.15) nor the implied win probability of placed bets (β<0.01, SE<0.01, p=0.44). Participants in the cash-out-available group engaged with the gambling task for longer than participants in the no-cash-out group (β=0.65, SE=0.23, p=0.0047). Conclusions: The provision of cash-out options in horse race betting results in significant changes in betting behaviour. These behaviours can lead to gambling harms, pointing towards the potential risks of the cash-out option.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".