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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

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


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This Article Abstract Free Full Text (Free PDF) Free Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by McBride, M. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?