Effects of winning and losing streaks on within-session chasing in online gambling: A replication and extension study

Loss-chasing is a key clinical symptom of gambling disorder. Examining its behaviouralmanifestation in real gambling will help better understand and identify problematic gamblingbehaviour. A recent study found that in a commercially available online gambling game,gamblers were more likely to stop playing and decreased stake sizes after immediate lossesthan wins but played more quickly following losses than wins (Chen et al., 2022). However,how within-session chasing may change across outcome streaks was unclear. To address thisquestion, we analyzed a large-scale dataset (4308 gamblers, ~71 million rounds) from the samegamble, and assessed three facets of within-session chasing following winning and losingstreaks, namely persistence, changes in stake size and speed of play. We replicated the mainfindings from Chen et al. Extending the previous findings, gamblers decreased persistence andreduced stake sizes but did not change speed of play as losing streaks continued. No clearpattern was observed for winning streaks. Exploratory analyses indicated that reduced fundsfollowing losing streaks and the expectation that losing streaks will continue jointly may bestexplain these results. These findings provide more insights into the underlying mechanisms ofchasing and may help identify markers of chasing in real gambling.