desertverb
to leave a company, stop buying from a business, etc., especially in order to start working for or buying from one of their competitors:
The company is paying out millions in incentive bonuses to stop its best people from defecting.
Internet providers struggled to prevent angry customers defecting.
defect fromShe defected from the software company to take up a post at their main rival.
defect toA lot of traditional department stores' customers are defecting to discount stores.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Running away and escaping
abscond
abscond from somewhere
abscond with someone/something
back away
back off
elopement
elude
escape from someone/something
escape route
escapology
heel
leg
loose
run away
runaway
scarce
scarper
scram
throw
underground

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Organizations - joining & leaving

Examples of defecting

defecting

In English, many past and present participles of verbs can be used as adjectives. Some of these examples may show the adjective use.

For subjects of both rank types, the higher the expectation of defection, the higher the probability of defecting.
The terminal condition incorporates the fact that once discovered, a defecting banker is punished with autarky forever.
For both players, defecting is the dominant strategy and therefore always the best reply toward any strategy of the opponent.
Moreover, strategically defecting from strong candidates entails a risk.
In particular, defection by a merchant is punished by having the defecting merchant get the payoff from autarky, which is zero.
This is different, if the player using a reward option has been defecting in the first stage.
They are the same for all states, because defecting bankers have the flexibility to represent the state that provides the highest period utility.
As expectations of defection rise, the proportion of would-be co-operators defecting also rises.
This allows the opponent to exploit the agent so long as the opponent is not ' ' completely defecting' '.
There, that led to a slightly simpler formulation of the payoff from defecting than a deterministic lag.
However, in prisoners' dilemmas each agent is better off defecting whatever other agents do while this is not the case in pure coordination problems.
In the case of alcoholism, the agent benefits from defecting (drinking scotch) in a game he is playing with his future self.
We assume that, once the organized markets exist, there is a technology that keeps merchant's record of transaction, and punishment on defecting merchants is feasible.
As a result, the nasty sellers (exploitative agents) then learn to be reciprocative since cooperating would bring them more benefit than defecting in the long run.
To aid in the interpretation of the results, the log odds of defection are transformed into probabilities of defecting for each expectation level, and both rank types.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.