Sabotage in team contests

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Date

2019

Authors

Dogan, Serhat
Keskin, Kerim
Saglam, Cagri

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Publisher

Springer

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Abstract

In the contest literature sabotage is defined as a deliberate and costly activity that damages the opponent's likelihood of winning the contest. Most of the existing results suggest that anticipating a possible sabotage contestants would be discouraged from exerting high efforts. In this paper we investigate the act of sabotage in a team contest wherein team members exert costly efforts as a contribution to their team's aggregate effort which in turn determines the contest's outcome. For the baseline model with no sabotage there exists a corner equilibrium implying a free-rider problem in each team. As for the model with sabotage our characterization of Nash equilibrium reveals two important results: (i) a unique interior equilibrium exists so that the free-rider problem no longer is a concern and (ii) the discouragement effect of sabotage vanishes for some players. On top of those conclusions we investigate the team owner's problems of prize allocation and team formation with the objective being to maximize his team's winning probability.

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Keywords

Team contests, Sabotage, Tullock contests, Free riding, Discouragement effect, Encouragement effect

Turkish CoHE Thesis Center URL

Citation

9

WoS Q

Q2

Scopus Q

Q1

Source

Volume

180

Issue

Start Page

383

End Page

405