New Directions in Internet Gambling Research

Abstract: Partnerships between industry and research have yielded enormous opportunities to advance gambling research. These types of opportunities are particularly salient for online gambling research: online gambling player data allows researchers to easily observe and analyze players’ gambling behavior over longer periods of time compared to traditional means of data collection. A new partnership between the Cambridge Health Alliance Division on Addiction and GVC Holdings (the parent company of several online gambling operators) has the potential to advance internet gambling research even further by allowing us to track the same users across a wider range of gambling products. Implications: The ability to track internet gamblers across multiple types of gambling products will allow us to have a better understanding of users’ overall gambling behavior. This will make it easier to identify markers for problematic gambling earlier on and develop novel intervention systems for problem gamblers