P(r)aying for Friends: Religious Groups and the Market for Social Contacts

In this paper we emphasize the specific role that religious groups have in supplying social contacts and collective activities. For short, we call these services “friendship services”. We focus on religious groups in which there are individuals who could be labelled as entrepreneurs in the religious market, that is, individuals who incur some costs in return for compensation, like tithes, that depends on their personal characteristics. We study under what conditions they would find it profitable to invest in supplying friendship services, in addition to spiritual ones.