Merchant guilds have been portrayed as social networks that generated beneficial social capital by sustaining shared norms, effectively transmitting information, and successfully undertaking collective action. This social capital, it is claimed, benefited society as a whole by enabling rulers to...

This paper models the dynamic process through which a large society may succeed in building up its social capital by establishing a stable and dense pattern of interaction among its members. In the model, agents interact according to a collection of infinitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemmas played...