MOST PRODUCTIVE SCALE SIZE OF ALL-TIME NUMBER 1 RANKED SINGLES TENNIS PLAYERS: A DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS APPROACH

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is one of the leading tools used to measure the relative efficiency of peer decision making units (DMUs) which may have multiple inputs and outputs. DEA can give us the improvements that should be done to project the non-efficient DMUs on the efficient frontier. Most productive scale size is a unit on the efficient frontier that maximizes the average productivity of a given mix of inputs and outputs, and all managers seek to get such a scale for their organizations. This paper investigates the MPSS measurements for all-time number 1 ranked single tennis players considering the stats of both Grand Slam and Masters Tournaments. Number of total matches is used as the only input while titles, finals, and semi-finals are used as final outputs. As the Grand Slam Tournaments are twice important than the Masters’ ones, we modify the original model of MPSS to reflect this importance using assurance region (AR) principle. Interesting findings are obtained. Only seven among 25 players achieved MPSS. Roger Federer and Pete Sampras were not in the seven-player list. That is consistent with the fact that they played a big number of matches in Grand Slam and Masters Tournaments. Also, they won too many Tournaments with 500 and 250 points which are not considered in this study.