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Report

Consumers' views on informed choice in gambling

Findings from a research project to explore how consumers understand the meaning of “informed choice” in gambling.

Published
15 September 2026

Last updated
15 September 2026 - Changes

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Contents

2 - Introduction

Background

One of the Gambling Commission's core licensing objectives is to ensure that gambling is conducted in a fair and open way. Central to this is the expectation that consumers are able to make informed choices about their gambling: that products deliver what they promise, that rules and odds are transparent, and that consumer issues are addressed properly and promptly.

The current statement of principles defines informed choice in relatively broad terms. The Commission expects that gambling is fair in the way it is provided, that rules are transparent, and that players know what to expect. It commits to ensuring that easily understandable information is made readily available by gambling companies, covering the rules of the game, the probability of losing or winning, and the terms and conditions on which business is conducted. However, there is a lack of evidence-based understanding of what "informed choice" actually means to consumers in practice. This includes what information consumers need and when, the barriers and motivations that shape whether they engage with it, and the role that gambling companies and the wider environment play in supporting or undermining informed decisions.

What existing evidence tells us about informed choice

A rapid desk review, conducted as the first phase of this project, examined how informed choice is conceptualised in gambling and in 3 comparator regulated sectors: financial services, energy, and online safety. It assessed 53 sources and identified 5 themes that shaped the design of the qualitative research that followed.

  1. Informed choice is not a single moment but a continuous state. Understanding is shaped long before play by social norms, marketing exposure, and prior experience, and can be eroded during play by dissociation, narrowed attention, emotional arousal, and immersive product design. A framework focused only on pre-play transparency risks missing much of what determines whether a consumer is genuinely informed.
  2. Providing information is not the same as ensuring comprehension. Across comparator sectors, the regulatory direction of travel is away from disclosure-based standards ("was the information made available?") and towards outcome-based standards ("can the consumer actually understand and use it?"). The Financial Conduct Authority's (FCA) Consumer Duty is the clearest example, requiring firms to demonstrate that their customers genuinely comprehend what they are being told.
  3. Consumer motivation to engage with information is variable, not absent. Generic messaging tends to fail not because consumers cannot read it, but because they do not find it relevant enough to process. When information is personalised, timely, and actionable, engagement increases.
  4. The choice environment can actively work against informed decisions, not merely fail to support them. Burying information behind additional clicks, pre-setting unfavourable options (such as higher stake sizes or opt-ins to marketing or bonuses) that consumers must actively opt out rather than opt in, introducing friction into withdrawals while streamlining deposits, and placing safer gambling messages where they compete with high-stimulus content all materially reduce the likelihood that consumers will make informed choices.
  5. The division of responsibility between consumers, gambling companies, and regulators remains contested. Existing evidence suggests consumers favour shared responsibility but are divided on how proactive gambling companies should be.

Together, these themes provided a foundation for the qualitative research, identifying where the evidence base was thin on consumer perspectives and where there were open questions that only consumers themselves could answer.

Key objectives and approach

This work will build upon existing research conducted by both the Gambling Commission and external organisations, specifically addressing theme 4 of the Commission’s Evidence Gaps and Priorities programme: ‘The impact of operator practices’ and the Consumer Comprehension Evidence Roadmap.

This project was designed to address 4 objectives:

  1. To define informed choice from the consumer's perspective: assessing how different consumer groups interpret the term and the extent to which they feel empowered to make informed decisions in current gambling environments.
  2. To explore practical implementation: investigating what informed choice looks like when translated from a theoretical definition into real-world consumer journeys, using the Gambling Commission's Path to Play framework as a guide.
  3. To examine the responsibility split: building on previous deliberative work (opens in new tab) (BIT, 2025), which indicated that consumers place a high degree of responsibility on gambling companies while acknowledging their own role, and seeking to define where the balance of responsibility lies in practice at different stages of the journey.
  4. To consider the balance between information and experience: exploring how best to provide information to support informed choice without creating additional frictions that undermine the enjoyment of a product.

Structure of this report

The remainder of this report is organised as follows. The next section outlines the study's methodology. The findings then begin with how consumers understand informed choice, whether they feel informed and where they place responsibility for it. Then it examines participants’ views on informed choice through the Path to Play framework, across the stages of the gambling journey: deciding whether and what to play, the play experience itself, and how consumers stay informed of outcomes. The report concludes with a set of cross-cutting themes drawing together the key findings and next steps.

In addition to this report, we provided the Commission with a conceptual framework1 that draws on the report’s insights to outline recommended steps to conceptualise and measure informed choice. The framework offers practical recommendations for identifying key outcomes that can be used to assess whether informed choice is achieved in practice, the target behaviours necessary to deliver those outcomes, and approaches for evaluating the barriers and facilitators that influence those behaviours. Ultimately, the framework, together with this report, can support the Commission in prioritising future research and generating further experimental evidence on consumer comprehension and decision-making.

References

3The conceptual framework was provided to the Gambling Commission as an internal working tool and is not published alongside this report.

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Informed choice - Method
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