1 Innovation and the Resilience of Religion Sriya Iyer2 Chander Velu3 Jun Xue4 Tirthankar Chakravarty5 21 December 2010 1 This work has been funded by the Spiritual Capital Research Program, sponsored by the Metanexus Institute on Religion and Science, with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation. Iyer is also grateful for research grant support to the Isaac Newton Trust, University of Cambridge. We are especially indebted to Indicus Analytics, Laveesh Bhandari, Siddartha Dutta, Shaheen Ansari, Gaurav Munjal, Suryakant Yadav, and the Indicus team who assisted us in helping collect the data for the India religion survey. For excellent research assistance we thank Rachana Shanbhogue, Abdul Mumit, Paul Sweeny and Nitika Khaitan. For helpful discussions we thank Robert Barro, Eli Berman, Partha Dasgupta, Sanjeev Goyal, Larry Iannaccone, Ben Jann, Timur Kuran, Rachel McCleary, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Melvyn Weeks, and the other participants of the Spiritual Capital Research Program. For helpful comments we thank lecture series participants at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. 2 Corresponding author: Faculty of Economics and St. Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DD, United Kingdom. Tel: 44 1223 335257. Email:
[email protected] 3 Judge Business School, University of Cambridge.
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[email protected] 5 University of California, San Diego.
[email protected] 1 Abstract This paper examines innovations to religious and non-religious service provision by religious organizations in India. We present a stylized Hotelling-style model in which two religious organizations position themselves at opposite locations to differentiate themselves on the religious spectrum in order to compete to attract adherents.