Stark-Bainbridge Theory of Religion
During the late 1970s and 1980s, Stark worked with William Sims Bainbridge on the Stark-Bainbridge theory of religion, and co-wrote the books The Future of Religion (1985) and A Theory of Religion (1987) with Bainbridge. Nowadays their theory, which aims to explain religious involvement in terms of rewards and compensators, is seen as a precursor of the more explicit recourse to economic principles in the study of religion as later developed by Laurence Iannaccone and others.
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