This study has generated new insights into the kinds of gambling environments that are most consistent with safe play. We found that the environments orientated towards the Social and Value segments were most conducive to attracting players with relatively few gambling problems, while the High Roller and Internet-focused environments had greater appeal for players with problems and vulnerabilities. The segments were named according to their dominant features: Social, Value, High Roller and Internet. The first genuinely electronic slot machine, e.g., the video slot machine, was developed in 1976 in Las Vegas, Nevada. K-means clustering on these utilities identified four unique market segments for EGM gambling, representing four different types of consumers.
Participants' choices amongst sets of hypothetical gambling environments allowed for an estimation of the implied individual-level utilities for each feature (e.g., general sounds, location, etc.). (EGM Environments that contribute to excess consumption and harm, 2015), a sample of 245 EGM gamblers were sourced from clubs in Victoria, Australia, and 7516 gamblers from an Australian national online survey-panel. Using the same dataset first described by Rockloff et al.
in J Gambl Issues 2016b), and a discrete choice experiment was conducted through an online survey. A select set of environmental features was sourced from a prior study (Thorne et al. This study used a marketing-research paradigm to explore gamblers' attraction to EGMs based on different elements of the environment.
