Sabotaging Potential Rivals

This paper studies sabotage in a contest with non-identical players. Unlike previous papers, we consider sabotage in an elimination contest and allow contestants to sabotage a potential or future rival. It turns out that for a certain seeding of players there is a pure-strategy equilibrium in which only the most able contestant engages in sabotage while less able contestants do not. The most able contestant may therefore prefer a situation where sabotage is allowed to one where sabotage is not allowed. For another seeding of players, there is a unique equilibrium in which none of the players invests in sabotage.