Social capital has emerged as a paradigm capable of bridging across various social science disciplines. However, its adoption by social scientists from different disciplines has led to multiple and often conflicting definitions. Besides conflicting definitions, some social scientists have argued that social capital lacks the properties of capital and should be called something other than capital. This paper resolves many of the problems created by conflicting definitions by pointing out that the differences have arisen primarily because scientists have included in the definition expressions of its possible uses, where it resides, and how its service capacity can be changed. This paper argues that these applications of social capital should not be included in its definition. This paper also defends the social capital paradigm against the claim that it lacks capital-like properties by pointing out that social capital, when defined as sympathy, has many important capital-like properties including transformation capacity, durability, flexibility, substitutability, opportunities for decay (maintenance), reliability, ability to create other capital forms, and investment (disinvestment) opportunities. Finally, this paper compares social capital to other forms of capital including cultural capital and human capital.Sympathy, Social Capital, Cultural Capital, Organizational Capital, Human Capital, Physical Financial Capital, Transformation Capacity, Durability, Flexibility, Substitutability, Decay Maintenance, Reliability, Investment Disinvestment,

A method for constructing interval measurements of decision makers' absolute risk-aversion functions is presented. Under this new procedure, the form of the absolute risk-aversion function is not restricted, and the precision of the interval measurement can be determined by the analyst. Interval measurements are used with the criterion of stochastic dominance with respect to a function to order uncertain choices. An empirical test shows that interval measurements exclude preferred choices from consideration less often than do single-valued utility functions and are more discriminating than first-and second-degree stochastic dominance.

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Social capital in the past two decades has emerged as a dominant paradigm in the various social science disciplines. However, its adoption by the different social science disciplines has led to multiple and often conflicting definitions of social capital. Some differences in the definition of social capital can be explained because scientists have included in the definition expressions of its possible uses, where it resides, and how its service capacity can be changed. This paper defends the social capital metaphor by pointing out that social capital has many important capital-like properties including service potential, durability, flexibility, substitutability, opportunities for decay (maintenance), reliability, ability to create other capital forms, and investment (disinvestment) opportunities. Social capital is compared to other forms of capital including cultural capital and human capital.