Does Competition Affect an Individual’s Willingness to Sabotage?

Competitions, or competitive incentives, have been shown, and are used in various real-world settings, to induce higher productivity and output. At the same time, in settings where individuals are able to affect the productivity or output of others, competition can also lead to individuals sabotaging one another. There are two main reasons as to why individuals sabotage when engaged in a competition. First, competition ties one’s payoff (e.g., earnings) to relative performance. This introduces a monetary incentive to sabotage others as it allows one to increase their likelihood of achieving a better relative performance and hence, a higher payoff. Second, being engaged in a competition alters an individual’s psyche and puts them in a competitive state of mind. This might in turn increase their willingness to hurt others in order to benefit themselves (i.e., their willingness to sabotage others to increase their potential payoff). The purpose of this project is to parse these two mechanisms and establish the latter which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been focused on in the literature on competition and sabotage. By utilising a lab experiment and randomising participants to see different compensation schemes which are designed to have the same monetary incentive to sabotage others but differ in the degree to which they trigger a sense of competition, this project aims to investigate whether individuals engage in sabotage differently across these different compensation schemes despite having the same underlying monetary incentive to do so.