Risk Awareness and Complexity in Students' Gambling

Gambling is widespread among teenagers, requiring intervention to protect especially problem gamblers. 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 introduce two gambling indicators that are new in the literature and are useful to public policy assessment: a measure of popularity of di?erent gambling products in Italy and a gambling-pattern index. We analyzed 4025 students aged 15 to 19 years in a large-scale survey from the ESPAD® Italia 2018 project (European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs). An Ordinal Logit Regression is applied considering the SOGS-RA problem gambling indicator together with socio-behavioural sphere, gambling context and family related variables and a specific indicator pertinent to economic risk perception. The gambling context variables have been created using the bipartite network and complexity measures defined by Hidalgo-Haussman (2009), considering the number of games played by each student and how popular these gambling products are among the players. The results show that problem gamblers are aware of the economic risks associated with gambling, 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.