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Club Mormon

Free-Riders, Monitoring, and Exclusion in the LDS Church

Michael McBride, Department of Economics, University of California, Irvine, 3151 Social Science Plaza, Irvine, CA, 92697-5100, USA, mcbride{at}uci.edu

The Mormon Church is best understood as a club, in the economics sense of the term. It succeeds, in part, because it identifies and selectively rewards high contributors, thereby limiting free-riding and producing large religious benefits for its members. First, it offers a menu of club goods of varying excludability, with the most valued goods excluded from less-committed members. Second, to enforce this menu, it actively monitors its members using a sophisticated administrative structure. The menu design reflects to an extent the costs of excludability of various religious goods, and the menu-monitoring approach implicitly allows some free-riding to dynamically foster commitment. Because the menu-monitoring approach is best understood as complementing other methods in achieving the Mormon Church's religious goals, these findings yield insights into the activities of other religious groups.

Key Words: religion • game theory • rational choice • organization

Rationality and Society, Vol. 19, No. 4, 395-424 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1043463107083736


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