This research addresses a lack of evidence on the positive and negative health outcomes of competitive online gaming and esports, particularly among young people and adolescents. Well-being outcomes, along with mitigation strategies were measured through a cross sectional survey of Australian gamers and non-gamers aged between 12 and 24 years, and parents of the 12–17-year-olds surveyed. Adverse health consequences were associated with heavy gaming, more so than light/casual gaming, suggesting that interventions that target moderated engagement could be effective. It provides timely insights in an online gaming landscape that has rapidly evolved over the past decade, and particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, to include the hyper-connected, highly commercialized and rapidly growing online gaming and esports sector.
Explaining and predicting the choices of consumers is perhaps the most enduring research problem faced by the behavioural sciences. Of the range of methods used to gather information about consumers preferences, choice based approaches are common place in both academia and industry. For the most part, consumers preferences from this type of data are typically evaluated assuming preferences for the attributes of alternatives in choice are independent as a necessity due to the limitations of the statistical model. Recent advances in choice modelling however present an opportunity to consider that there may be a latent structure to decision makers' taste sensitivities (preference parameters) and further, behavioural decision theory may be useful in helping the researcher specify that structure. This thesis documents three applications of structural choice modelling that both test behavioural decision theory as well as contribute new interpretations about how behavioural decision theory may manifest as structures within the latent dimensions of consumers utility function.Each application considers the structure of the taste variation (preference heterogeneity) in decision makers' taste sensitivities towards the attributes of transport services. In each case, behavioural decision theory is drawn upon to first predict what structures might be expected, and subsequently structural choice models are specified to represent theory. This unique modelling approach allows the following types of research questions to be addressed:• How does the nature of the choice environment affect the taste sensitivities in decision makers' preferences for particular product/service attributes?• Are latent sources of variation in consumers taste sensitivities stable or dynamic?iii iv Abstract • What are the drivers of commonalities between the decision makers' taste sensitivities for the attributes of alternatives in choice?• Is there a relationship between the way consumers think about their priorities and the way consumers make choices?These questions are explored using so-called structural choice models. Structural choice models are type of factor-analytic choice model (a very general form of mixed logit). The model allows for a parsimonious representation of the ways in which consumers vary in their tastes and preferences. Representing the unobserved sources of taste variation as latent variables and specifying a structure to the latent variables offer great flexibility, including data from the same consumers from different choice tasks. This allows the researcher, for example, to specify latent variables general to several data generation processes and others unique to one particular process. Thus, the extent to which attributes under different scenarios are indeed treated by decision makers' as the same can be assessed. From a policy perspective, the design of more nuanced policy responses may be possible given the insight into the structure of the heterogeneity in decision makers' preferences. The thesis is presented in the following...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.