Two Notions of Social Capital

Matteo Alpino and Halvor Mehlum

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We propose a model that reconciles two aspects of social capital: social capital as reciprocal sharing of favors within a selected group vs. social capital as trust that lubricates transactions in societies. The core assumption is that individuals have productive potentials, e.g. innovations, that can not be put at use autonomously. However, individuals can associate in a club to match productive innovator-implementor dyads among the members. For a given club, allowing one new member has the effect of a) an increased pool of innovations and b) an increased pool of potential implementors. Whether a particular member supports the expansion of the club depends on whether she expects to be an implementor or an innovator. When expansion of membership is decided by vote, both small exclusive clubs and open clubs encompassing the whole society can emerge. The outcome depends both on the voting protocol, on the distribution of innovator and implementor skills, and on the maximal potential club size. Moreover, identical environments may generate multiple equilibrium club sizes. In which of these the society ends up depends on the initial conditions and on the voting protocol.

Keywords: Social capital; matching; voting in clubs. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 C78 D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-02-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/105753/1/MPRA_paper_105753.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Two notions of social capital (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:105753

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().