On the persistence of business alliances: the case of Major League Baseball trading patterns

Informal relationships play an important role in the business world. Major League Baseball provides a unique business setting in which the personal relationships among the competing managements would appear to be critical. A contingency table analysis of all intraleague Major League trades between 1903 and 1959 shows, however, that economic efficiency and synergies offer the most cogent explanation for who has been trading or not with whom. The personal factor is more notable by its scarcity than by its surfeit.