Risk awareness and complexity in students’ gambling

Problem gambling is widespread among teenagers. The primary aim of the present study is to understand whether young problem gamblers are aware of the economic risks associated with gambling. Secondly, we explore the possibility that problem gambling is related with some specific pattern of play. We use a large-scale survey from the ESPAD ® _Italia 2018 project (European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs). We test the relationship between the SOGS-RA problem gambling indicator, and some socio-behavioural and family-related variables, a specific indicator pertinent to economic risk perception and two gambling context variables. These variables have been created using the bipartite network and complexity measures defined by Hidalgo and Haussman (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 106:10570–10575, 2009), considering the number of games played by each student and how popular these gambling products are. The results show that problem gamblers are aware of the economic risks and at the same time tend to play more games and more unpopular games than non-problem gamblers. The likely effectiveness of different policies is discussed in the light of this evidence.