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Research suggests that populations of gamblers can adapt rapidly to online sports betting services after subscribing. The results provide an opportunity for broadcasters, developers, teams, leagues, and even athletes to capitalize on the unique relationship between fantasy participants and professional athletes. Two samples of fantasy participants (football and baseball) were tested from a mechanistic dehumanization perspective. The current study looked to confirm the previous work and extend it to the context of fantasy baseball. Recent research, however, found fantasy football participants actually humanize their own fantasy athletes over non-fantasy athletes.

Previous work studying dehumanization in gaming has found outcomes related to moral disengagement and isolation. The social competition and romanticized ownership of the game spur strategy where participants theoretically utilize professional athletes in a mechanistic fashion, and as a result, may dehumanize them in the process. The dehumanization of professional athletes by sports fans has become a talking point for mainstream media, and fantasy sports participation is in the crosshairs. states and continues to elicit controversy. This study should further the literature on the contentious activity, which has been outlawed in many U.S. Additionally, we provide a thorough discussion of industry characteristics, prior literature, and gameplay, which should help readers familiarize themselves with this burgeoning fantasy sports variant. We also find that participants paying to enter more lineups in a given contest earn profits far more often than those entering few lineups, indicating that the number of lineups entered can serve as a proxy for skill. Using econometric analysis, we find that winning participants utilize different strategies than losing participants for example, winning participants more frequently select NBA rookies and international players. In our study, the first thorough examination of DFB, we show that DFB is a game in which skill is necessary for success. Using hand-collected data from, a major daily fantasy sports website, we analyze draft selections of thousands of participants in daily fantasy basketball (DFB).
