Nudging Online Gamblers to Withdraw Money: The Impact of Personalized Messages on Money Withdrawal Among a Sample of Real-World Online Casino Players

A number of scholars have argued that online gambling can be more problematic than land-based gambling. Motivating gamblers to withdraw money from their online gambling account could lower losses because there would be less money available to lose. Therefore, the present study investigated whether personalized messages are an effective way of 'nudging' gamblers to withdraw money from their online gambling account. The authors were given access to a secondary dataset by Nederlandse Loterij (the national Dutch Lottery operator) comprising 4049 online gamblers. Two types of messages were used to 'nudge' gamblers to withdraw money from their gambling account (i.e., a 'winning streak' message and a 'withdrawal' message). The findings indicated that (i) 38% of gamblers reading the 'winning streak' messages withdrew money from their gambling account on the same day, and (ii) 18% of gamblers reading the 'withdrawal' messages withdrew money from their gambling account on the same day. Gamblers who read personalized messages also withdrew larger amounts of money from their gambling accounts compared to gamblers who did not read personalized messages. The findings suggest that the personalized messages can have an impact on both the likelihood to withdraw money as well as the amount of money which was withdrawn and could help reduce gambling-related harm.