The dire consequences of a corrupt sport contest

We study setups where the winner of a qualifying Tullock contest can participate in a subsequent sport competition where their relative performance depends on initial efforts at the qualifying stage. If the qualifying contest is staged in favour of a team, the cheating team always sees its qualifying probability improve. The effect on investments, however, is non-monotonic: for mild levels of cheating, the higher likelihood of qualifying for the subsequent competition strengthens the cheating team’s incentives to invest, raising its effort above the unbiased benchmark; for intense levels of cheating, the near-certainty of qualifying eliminates the incentive to compete for the local prize, and the cheating team drastically cuts its investments. The rival team, on the other hand, always reduces its equilibrium effort as corruption becomes more intense. The cheating player has incentives to carry out illegal activities since his payoff increases in cheating. In such corrupt qualifiers, the champion tends to be the cheating player, and the representative from this qualifying group in the subsequent competition will perform worse if corruption is intense.