In many environments, tournaments can elicit more effort from workers, except perhaps when workers can sabotage each … the incentive effect of tournaments is thin. There is even less evidence on the impact of sabotage because real world acts … of sabotage are often subtle manifestations of subjective peer evaluation or "office politics." We discuss a real effort …

the presence of tournament incentives, agents react reciprocally to higher wages, which mitigates the sabotage problem …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 …

their expected performances. The sabotage operates to create more homogeneity. Under the one-loser tournament, each worker … attacked by all peers. I argue that the one-loser tournament is more subject to damage by sabotage than the one … the loser-selecting tournament, which means the promotion ratio is more than one-half, workers prefer a low risk approach …

behavior in experimental contests with heterogeneous players who are able to mutually sabotage each other. We find that …'s identity is revealed sabotage decreases while retaliation motives prevail. Our results promise to be valuable when designing …