On sabotage in collective tournaments

In this paper a tournament between teams (a collective tournament) is considered, where each contestant may spend productive effort in order to increase his team's performance or sabotage the members of the opponent team. It is shown that each team directs all its sabotage activities at exactly one of the opponent team's least able members. This is due to two effects, a decreasing-returns effect and a complementarity effect. The result is of particular interest, as findings on individual tournaments indicate that very able players should usually be sabotaged most strongly.