A performance evaluation of Major League Baseball teams: An integrated social network and data envelopment analysis

An organisation's position within a network is known to influence its performance. This study proposes a novel evaluation model, incorporating social networking variables, to measure 30 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams' performances. Using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique, the empirical results of this study show that inefficiencies are due to purely technical rather than scale effects. The results of a sensitivity analysis indicated that the betweenness centrality had a higher level of influence on each team's performance than on the salaries paid. If the betweenness centrality was not considered, five of the teams considered to be technically efficient would become inefficient.