Increasing returns to scale: The solution to the second-order social dilemma, a research fruit of the Simulation Experiment team of the ICSS, School of Economics, Zhejiang University, was published in Scientific Reports subordinate to Nature on August 18. This paper, using computer simulation technology, simulated the collective cooperative activity of the primitive ethnic groups in hunting and collecting societies (such as large-scale hunting, defending foreign invasions and building public water conservancy projects). The research found out that if a social cooperation has large increasing returns to scale, it can effectively resolve the famous “second-order social dilemma” in evolutionary game theory, thus providing a new way of thinking to this theoretical challenge.

From January to August this year, three research teams of the ICSS, namely, “Behavioral Experiment”, “Neural Experiment” and “Simulation Experiment” published 9 papers in SCI, SSCI and other international academic journals. Moreover, four papers were published in “Economic Research”, “Social Sciences in China Review”, “Social Science Front” and “South China Journal of Economics” and a number of papers were reprinted in full by the periodical literatures of Renmin University of China.