Recently, Prof. Kainan Huang’s paper “Co-evolution between Industrial Technologies and Institutions: Based on Multi-agent Learning Process”won the first Prize of Humanities and Social Sciences Outstanding Achievement Award of Shandong Provincial Department of Education; Associate Prof. Linke Hou’s paper “Of time, leadership, and governance: Elite incentives and stability maintenance in China” won the third Prize of Humanities and Social Sciences Outstanding Achievement Award of Shandong Provincial Department of Education.

Prof. Huang’s paper published in <Economic Research Journal> in 2018, This paper explores the co-evolution of technologies and institutions from the perspective of multi-agent learning.Technological evolution includes not only the expansion of technological boundaries, but also changes in the shares of different technologies in a given area. The former is innovation-driven and the latter is driven by structural change. Compared with the emphasis of new institutional economics on reducing transaction costs, evolutionary economics emphasizes cognitions of institutions. Institutions not only influence interaction among participants by influencing transaction costs, but also influence their learning behavior by shaping the rules of learning. Institutional evolution includes not only the emergence of new institutions that change the original institutional space, but also changes in the proportions of different types in a given institutional space. As technology and institutions jointly determine the fitness or economic performance of participants, the evolution of the two will lead to co-evolution.

Assosicate Prof. Linke Hou’s paper published in <Governance> in 2018. China's party‐controlled elite appointment system has been praised for contributing to growth and order in recent decades. Inspired by Mancur Olson's insight into elite incentives and governance, this paper examined how the Chinese practices of elite management affect the character of governance using unique survey and interview data on township leaders and social contention. They find that, first, externally appointed party secretaries experience more petitions and mass incidents during their tenure and are more likely to use coercion to deal with petitions than internally appointed secretaries. Second, these tendencies are moderated when externally appointed party secretaries are paired with internally appointed township heads they explore the implications of such behavioral differences and suggest our findings are of broad significance for understanding governance in China.