“Individual ” Social Capital, “Social” Networks, and Their Linkages to Economic Game

This essay makes a conceptual distinction between societal categories, such as social networks, norms, and social status differentiation, on the one hand, and social capital invested by individual agents on the other. The former are institutional phenomena arising as outcomes of social-exchange games in which individual agents invest strate-gically in social capital. Recent development of neuroscience suggests the future pos-sibility of measuring social payoffs in terms of trade-off relationships with hedonic payoffs. This possibility may suggest that a linked-game approach to social capital and its implications for economic performance are more promising. This approach might make feasible an analysis of socioeconomic networks that is not possible using an eco-nomic or sociological approach in isolation. Particularly, this essay suggests a way to apply the linked-game approach to the problem of the tragedy of the commons, which is becoming one of the most acute public issues of our time. About 10 years ago, Partha Dasgupta and Ismail Serageldin edited a useful volume on social capital based on a years-long project of the World Bank (Dasgupta and Ser-ageldin 1999). Articles included in that volume exhibited varied views on the concep