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 behavioral manifestation in real gambling will help better understand and identify problematic gambling behavior. A recent study by Chen et al., (2022) found that in a commercially available online gambling game, gamblers were more likely to stop playing and decreased stake sizes after immediate losses than wins but played more quickly following losses than wins. However, how within-session chasing may change across outcome streaks was unclear. To address this question, we analyzed a large-scale dataset (4308 gamblers, ~71 million rounds) from the same gamble, and assessed three facets of within-session chasing following winning and losing streaks, namely persistence, changes in stake size and speed of play. We replicated the main findings from Chen et al. Extending the previous findings, gamblers decreased persistence and reduced stake sizes but did not change speed of play as losing streaks continued. No clear pattern was observed for winning streaks. Exploratory analyses indicated that reduced funds following losing streaks and the expectation that losing streaks will continue jointly may best explain these results. These findings provide more insights into the underlying mechanisms of chasing and may help identify markers of chasing in real gambling.