Abstract
Social capital theory is exemplary in attempting to integrate both individual and institutional perspectives in the study of governance, but interactions between the individual and institutional components remain underexplored and unspecified in many situations. We extend the theory from its focal attention on prisoners dilemma games to an important and understudied class of collective action problems of critical concern for governance— coordination tasks ranging from simple matching games to more complex tasks involving conflict (battle of the sexes) and assurance problems (stag hunt). Laboratory experiments provide a means of observing the impact of institutional influences (bridging and bonding network capital), individual predispositions (trust and risk aversion), and their interaction on the ability to coordinate in these settings. The results confirm that neither individual nor institutional components alone can explain coordination, and that interactions between these components must be understood in terms of the specific task context being studied.