Advantageous defensive efforts in contests

Understandably, defensive sabotage or destructive efforts devoted to reducing the opponent's score are an option used by contestants who endeavor to enhance their objective of winning the contest. This paper focuses on two questions. First, does this option necessarily reduce the effective productive efforts of the contestants? Second, can such efforts also help to attain an objective that is affected by the contestants' effective efforts and by the gap in their performance? The positive answer to these questions is our novel contribution to the literature on contests with sabotage.