The effect of a scarcity mindset and the encouragement of gambling biases on gambling activity

This study examines to what extent a scarcity mindset and the exposure to a statistical gambling sheet alter an individual’s gambling activity. This is done by setting up an online experiment, which consists of two parts. The first part contained a questionnaire on the subject’s demographics and a recall task on events which happened in the past. The second part contained a gambling game, where subjects could play up to 50 roulette rounds. The subjects were randomly allocated to one of the four groups: control, only scarcity, only gambling bias and scarcity*gambling bias. There are two approaches used to capture the gambling activity of subjects. The first approach measures the length of gambling in the roulette task, while the second approach examines the intensity of gambling in the roulette task. Mann-Whitney U tests were performed to measure the differences in the length and intensity of gambling between two groups. The first test measured the differences in gambling activity between the control and the only scarcity group, the second analysis examined the differences in gambling activity between the control and the only gambling bias group, while the third test investigated the differences in gambling activity between the only scarcity and the scarcity*gambling bias group. The findings of the analyses did not indicate that the scarcity mindset treatment led to significant differences in the length and intensity of gambling. Furthermore, providing a statistical gambling sheet did not lead to differences in gambling activity between the control and the only gambling bias group. Similar results were found for the effect of the statistical sheet treatment on the length and intensity of gambling among people in scarcity. Additionally to the Mann- Whitney U tests an ordinary least squares (OLS) test was performed. The OLS analysis indicated that subjects in the only scarcity group played significantly fewer rounds on average than subjects in the control group. This statistical significance is inconsistent with the findings of the Mann- Whitney U test. A possible explanation for this inconsistency between models is that the OLS analysis is more sensitive to outliers than a Mann-Whitney U test.