Carow Hall, Mtg Room
December 02, 2007, 07:00 PM to 07:00 PM
In this dissertation, I build a computational model of sectarian religious clubs to discover the distributional properties of religious sacrifice and commitment within a heterogeneous population. First, I analyze extremist groups, finding that strong substitutability of club production for private secular production to be necessary, and weakly sufficient, for the viability of extremist groups. Second, I demonstrate that religious groups requiring moderate sacrifices are viable when religious club goods and private secular goods are weakly substitutable and incomes are relatively high. The marginal complementarity of goods prevents severe free riding, while moderate sacrifices mitigate the effects of easy riding and screen out low commitment individuals. Third, I identify and model the emergence of religious population divides. Using the 2005 Baylor Religious Survey, overlapping, but distinct religious subpopulations are identified in the United States. Analysis of the 1998 ISSP Survey reveals that similar subpopulations exist in 26 of 30 surveyed nations. The computational model emerges religious divides in agent populations with distributional properties similar to those found in the survey data.