Adopting An Affordability Approach to Responsible Gambling and Harm Reduction: Considerations for Implementation in a North American Context

The proliferation of gambling opportunities worldwide, including continuous online gambling, has generated concern over how to protect individuals and families from harm caused by excessive spending. In response, researchers and operators have worked with big data to develop risk-identification models to identify indicators of problem gambling. Such models are generally proprietary, non-transparent, and non-generalizable across games, jurisdictions, or player populations, rendering them impractical as regulatory tools. In North America, responsible gambling efforts largely place the onus on players to control their behavior; however, in the UK and elsewhere, regulations have shifted to a model of shared responsibility that targets ‘affordability,’ the amount individual players can afford to lose, instead of indicators of problem gambling. This affordability approach avoids the need for regulators and operators to be clinicians, attempting to identify disorder. Rather, it builds on existing systems to determine creditworthiness and player risk levels. Using affordability as the key benchmark for responsible gambling, we discuss approaches to operationalizing affordability guidelines in a North American context. Such guidelines will aid in promoting the objective identification of players who are spending beyond their means and facilitate the necessary transition to a shared responsibility model for harm reduction.