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 ab...

“There is the employer’s sabotage as well as the worker’s sabotage. Employers interfere with the quality of production, they interfere with the quantity of production, they interfere with the supply as well as with the kind of goods for the purpose of increasing their profit. But this form of sabotage, capitalist sabotage, is antisocial, for the reason that it is aimed at the benefit of the few...

Many tournaments are plagued by sabotage among competitors. Typically, sabotage is welfare-reducing, but from an individual’s perspective an attractive alternative to exerting positive effort. Yet, given its illegal and often immoral nature, sabotage is typically hidden, making it difficult to assess its extent and its victims. Therefore, we use data from Judo World Championships, where a rule ...

Sabotage in Tournaments: Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment Although relative performance schemes are pervasive in organizations reliable empirical data on induced sabotage behavior is almost non-existent. We study sabotage in tournaments in a controlled laboratory experiment and are able to confirm one of the key insights from theory: effort and sabotage increase with the wage spread. Addit...

Sabotage in Tournaments: Evidence from a Natural Experiment Many tournaments are plagued by sabotage among competitors. Typically, sabotage is welfare-reducing, but from an individual’s perspective an attractive alternative to exerting positive effort. Yet, given its illegal and often immoral nature, sabotage is typically hidden, making it difficult to assess its extent and its victims. Therefo...

Sabotage in Tournaments: Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment Although relative performance schemes are pervasive in organizations reliable empirical data on induced sabotage behavior is almost non-existent. We study sabotage in tournaments in a controlled laboratory experiment and are able to confirm one of the key insights from theory: effort and sabotage increase with the wage spread. Addit...

Sabotage modal logic was proposed in 2003 as a format for analyzing games that modify the graphs they are played on. We investigate some model-theoretic and proof-theoretic aspects of sabotage modal logic, which has largely come to be viewed as an early dynamic logic of graph change. Our first contribution is a characterization theorem for sabotage modal logic as a fragment of first-order logic...

Recent industry developments motivate the study of cross-market firm integrations, which often raises controversies and regulatory concerns due to the potential negative effects through the integrated firms’ sabotage activities. In this paper, we analyze integrations of firms in two interrelated markets that produce complementary products. Two firms compete with differentiated products in each ...

We analyze the incentives of a vertically-integrated producer (VIP) to engage in “self-sabotage”. Self-sabotage occurs when a VIP intentionally increases its upstream costs and/or reduces the quality of its upstream product. We identify conditions under which self-sabotage is profitable for the VIP even though it raises symmetrically the cost of the upstream product to all downstream producers ...

Government can sabotage itself. From the president’s choice of agency heads to budgets, regulations, and litigating positions, presidents their appointees have undermined very programs they administer. But why would an try put itself out business? And how agencies that are subject array political legal checks statutory programs? This Article offers account “what, why, how” administrative answer...