  We establish for $2 \le k \le n-1$ the strict concavity of the function
$f_k(\lambda)=\log(\sigma_k(\lambda))$ on a subset of the positive cone
$\Gamma_n=\{\lambda=(\lambda_{1}, \lambda_{2}, \cdots,\lambda_{n})\in
\mathbb{R}^n; \lambda_j>0,j=1,\cdots, n\}$ where $\sigma_{k}(\lambda)$ is the
basic symmetric polynomial of degree $k,$ $2 \leq k \leq n.$ Then we apply the
result to study the so-called $d-$concavity of the $k-$Hessian type function
$F_{k}(R)=\log \left(S_{k}(R)\right),$ where $S_{k}(R)=\sigma_{k}(\lambda(R)),
\lambda(R)= \left(\lambda_{1}, \lambda_{2}, \cdots, \lambda_{n}\right) \in
\mathbb{C}^{n}$ is eigenvalue-vector of $R \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times n},$
$R=\omega+\beta, \omega^{T}=\omega, \omega>0, \quad \beta^{T}=-\beta.$ The
$d-$concavity will be used in our next paper to study the existence of
admissible solutions to the Dirichlet problem for the augmented nonsymmetric
$k-$Hessian type equations.
