Money Isn’t Everything: Estimating the Prestige Value of Winning Cutthroat Kitchen from Overbidding in Sabotage Auctions

We seek to estimate the prestige value of winning beyond monetary prizes in Cutthroat Kitchen, a cooking show in which dishes are judged in a series of elimination rounds, with the twist that action is periodically paused to auction sabotages against rivals. We estimate the distribution of contestants’ prestige values using a structural model of bidding by a contestant with rational expectations about sabotage effectiveness taken from the data. Our most conservative specification—allowing for risk aversion and bias in the beliefs about sabotage effectiveness—yields mean prestige values of nearly $10,000 for typical episodes and over $35,000 for tournaments.