The impact of cash out availability on online betting behavior

The rise of online sports betting, facilitated by technological innovations such as the cash-out feature, has transformed the gambling landscape. While cash-outs (a facility provided by betting operators which allows gamblers to close a bet early before the final outcome of a sports event is known) have been suggested to intensify problematic gambling behaviors, empirical studies to date have been correlational, leaving a gap in determining causal evidence. The present Registered Report investigated the direct impact of the perceived availability of the cash-out feature on various facets of gambling behavior in an online experiment. Hungarian residents with an online gambling history (N=595) were informed that they would have the chance to gamble with real money on sports events. Following random allocation, half of the participants were told that they would have the option to cash out their bets before the outcome of the sports event is known, while the other half did not have this option. Overall, the findings provided evidence that cash-out availability did not influence bet placement, wager size, or bet risk among our sample. However, the low variance in the outcomes may have limited the ability to detect subtle differences. Consequently, the null results should not be taken as conclusive evidence of no behavioral effect.