Religious Belief and Firm R&D Investment

Religion has a significant impact on the spiritual awareness and ideas of believers such as values as an important dimension of social culture. Studies have shown that the proportion of religious believers in China showed a clear upward trend in recent years, and the number of religious believers in private entrepreneurs has gradually increased. Current scholars have begun to pay attention to the role of religious beliefs on corporate behavior, and initially carried out the relevant research.

However, we can see from the existing research that scholars have not paid full attention to the relationship between entrepreneurs’ religious beliefs and corporate R&D investment, and the related research literatures are rare. R&D investment requires a lot of money and staff input, and it’ payback period is quite long, coupled with the possibility of failure in the R&D, so it is full of great risks. Of course, once the R&D investment activities were succeeded, it will bring great benefits to the enterprise. As long as researchers think that a R&D project can give them a full play, they will enthusiastically immerse in the R&D project, which not only make the researchers to enjoy the fun of the process, but also increase their own academic values.

On the contrary, entrepreneurs who believe in religion have a strong sense of risk aversion, they are reluctant to try R&D projects that are relatively risky and quite uncertain, and also may interfere with the work of researchers related to R&D projects. This will affect researchers’ enthusiasm directly and bring a certain negative effect to the researchers, resulting in their work efforts and extent of focus on projects is greatly reduced.

Therefore, from the perspective of the influence of entrepreneurs’ religious belief on corporate strategic behavior and based on the spirit of free inquiry of researchers, this paper focuses on exploration and analysis of the role and mechanism of entrepreneurs’ religious belief on the R&D investment of enterprises, so as to provide the R&D strategic decision of private enterprises with practical guidance and theoretical references via constructing the game model.

Article by Gege Wang,et al,from South China University of Technology, China

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