A Note on Sabotage in Collective Tournaments

In this paper a tournament between teams (a collective tournament) is analyzed, where each contestant may spend productive e¤ort in order to increase his team’s performance or sabotage the members of the opponent team. It is shown that sabotaging the weaker members of a team always decreases their team’s performance more signi…cantly than sabotaging stronger members does. As a consequence, sabotage activities are only directed at a team’s weaker members. This …nding is quite interesting, as previous results on individual tournaments indicate that oftentimes only the stronger participants should be sabotaged. Key words: Collective Tournament, Sabotage, Complementarities JEL classi…cation: C72, J33, M52 I would like to thank Matthias Kräkel for helpful comments. Financial support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemainschaft (DFG), SFB-TR 15 (Governance and the e¢ ciency of economic systems), is gratefully acknowledged. Oliver Gürtler, Department of Economics, BWL II, University of Bonn, Adenauerallee 24-42, D-53113 Bonn, Germany. Tel.:+49-228-739214, Fax:+49-228-739210; E-mail: [email protected]