Cutthroat Regulations

So I am completely addicted to cooking competition shows like Chopped, Guy's Grocery Games, and Cutthroat Kitchen (unfortunately this has not improved my cooking). After talking about rent seeking, the theory of regulation, and how industries can expend huge amount of resources to obtain regulations has make me look at Cutthroat Kitchen (don't watch the whole thing, just the intro) in a completely different light. The gist of the game is that the host offers various sabotages (restrictions) for sale at an auction that can be bought and imposed on other competitors. The catch is that whoever wins the game only wins however much money they didn't spend on the sabotages. Sometimes people walk away with only a couple hundred dollars out of their $25,000 starting money. It does make sense that the competitors want to spend large amounts of money because they only gain anything if they beat everyone else.

It's not exactly like a deadweight loss, but it does seem like a lot of money to "waste" on the sabotages. And spending a large chunk of money on a sabotage doesn't even guarantee that it will knock out a different chef. The competitors are spending huge amount of resources on the possibility that the restrictions will hinder their competitors and reduce competitor output while maintaining their own output. This reminds me of the rent seeking behavior of some firms, that they expend large amount of resources on an increased probability that they might obtain the gain. Some of the sabotages mimic some of the regulations seen in industry like exclusive use of a knife (licensing restrictions). Sometimes competitors even pay to sabotage themselves! Similar to the firms that seek to regulate their own industry. Whatever the restrictions, it seems like an extremely large waste of resources.