Strategic behavior in contests with sabotage

Sabotage is incorporated into Dixit (1987)’s classic model of a two-player probabilistic symmetric contest to show that in contrast to his result and apart from a special case, a player will, if possible, commit to a level of effort different from that in Nash equilibrium. This implies that the subgame perfect equilibrium of the sequential contest differs from the Nash equilibrium of the corresponding simultaneous contest and that a player prefers to be the first mover in the former type of contest rather than participating in the latter type.