Bridging Individual and Group Level Social Capitals.

There are two main lines of conceptions of social capital ? individual level and group level social capital. Questions have been raised by individual level social scholars concerning the validity of group level social capital. Burt (1992) replies to the challenge by advocating that individual social capital aggregates into group level social capital. This paper moves beyond simple summation of lower level capital and presents a game theoretical model through which micro to macro production of social capital is accomplished. The paper also addresses the debate on social ties vs. social resource in the social capital literature. By explicitly modeling differential distribution of resources, the proposed model also redirects theoretical attention to hierarchical social structures that are prevalent in reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]