"Big Stacks can bully around the Small Stacks" blah blah blah

[Steve]

I've heard it a million times... in a MTT you need a big stack to bully the small stacks with. I don't buy it, can someone show me one ounce of mathematical proof of this? When you are close to the money I agree (small stacks need to survive to the $$$), but early on in the tournament there is no mathematical reason for it (if the small stacks want to play scared that is their own problem, but mathematically they are not at a disadvantage).

I bring this up because of a particular tournament I went to locally that allowed UNLIMITED rebuys regardless of your stack size. Some guys immediately rebought 10 or 20 times to get a big stack to bully people with... I say that was way -EV. The value of each chip goes down as your stack gets bigger, so they were getting less and less EV for each rebuy.