Slot floor layout strategy: Optimizing revenues vis-à-vis game location and popularity

Slot revenues are critical to the success of many of the world’s casinos. The rising cost of slot machines has often resulted in fewer games on the floor and fewer purchases of new games. Such conditions create choices for operators seeking to optimize slot revenues with their existing game mix, which invariably includes both high- and low-performing titles. Like game titles, the quality of all bank locations on the slot floor is not the same. Thus, operators must decide whether it is better to place the popular titles in the best locations and the less popular titles in the challenging locations, or the converse. The results of our paired-samples t test suggested it is the converse, as that combination produced a statistically and economically significant increase in daily t-win, over the course of a 120-day sample. Alternatively stated, the combination of high-performing titles in the bad location and low-performing titles in the good location outperformed the opposite combination. The observed increase in the mean daily t-win for the prevailing configuration was 21%, dropping to 18% with a single outlier omitted. The research design and method advanced herein offers a simple, rigorous, and objective means of examining this important question. Academically, this work extended research in the areas of both the servicescape and performance-potential studies aimed at the evaluation of individual slot machines.