Apply Production Efficiency to Assess the Pay Equity of Chinese Professional Baseball Pitchers

 People perceive inequity whenever they sense that the ratios between the outcomes they have obtained and their inputs do not equal the ratios for their counterparts. This argument represents the same logic that data envelopment analysis (DEA) applies to measure the relative efficiency using several inputs to produce a single output or a set of outputs. This study applies DEA to performance data in year 2007 for 43 pitchers of the Chinese professional baseball league (CPBL) and to estimate the proportion of pitchers who perceived their signed salaries for the next year were paid with inequity. Each pitcher is treated as a decision-making unit. The input variables include the numbers of innings pitched, the pitchers’ earned run averages, and walks plus hits per inning pitched, while the single and most important output is the pitcher’s salary for the next year (2008). The results show that approximately 91% CPBL pitchers (39 out of 43) perceived that they received relatively low salaries. Moreover, underpayment inequities were prevailing for both starting pitchers and relief ones without significant differences.