Sabotage in Tournaments: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
By Loukas Balafoutas, Florian Lindner, Matthias Sutter. Social Science Research Network, 2012
150 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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 change in 2009 basically constituted a natural experiment that introduced one costless opportunity for sabotage. In Judo, competitors can break an opponent's attack in an unsportsmanlike manner; these are seen as acts of sabotage. Based on a unique dataset of 1,422 fights, we find that the rule change in 2009 has led to a large increase in the use of sabotage. Moreover, sabotage is more likely to be employed by relatively less qualified individuals, and to be targeted at more qualified ones. From a survey among spectators, we show that sabotage is welfare-reducing.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0aa062a1a8a2e0b87c9d2de6903526378d7b1455
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Citations in the corpus
- Sabotage in contests: a survey (2015, background): “Balafoutas et al. (2012) analyze the interaction of ability and gender in sabotage decisions in Judo World Championships. They find that sabotage is used more by players with lower world ranking and is used more against players with higher world ranking, but there was no significant difference in sa”
- A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments (2014, unknown): “Similarly, Balafoutas et al. (2012) document that, controlling for beliefs, inequality-averse and spiteful subjects are less likely to enter tournaments.”