[VCEE Seminar] Talk by Ro’i Zultan

[Mailing list of the VCEE seminar series]

Dear all,

Ro’i Zultan (Department of Economics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) will give a talk at the Research Seminar of Department of Occupational, Economic and Social Psychology. The talk may be of interest to you, so I thought I would share the information.

When: Monday, Oct 12th 2026, 4:45 pm
Where: NIG Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna, Lecture Hall D, 6th floor.

Title: Provision and Maintenance of Public Goods

Why is cooperation often greater when people contribute to a public good than when they withdraw from an existing common resource? I present two experimental projects examining this asymmetry. First, the Dictatorial Public Goods Game separates contributions from an administrator’s decision to provide the public good or expropriate the resources. Administrators reciprocate contributions despite stronger monetary incentives to expropriate, and provide more often when expropriation is the default. These findings challenge an explanation based on revealed altruism. Second, new experiments independently frame one’s own and another person’s actions as helping or harming. Preliminary results suggest that cooperation increases when both players’ actions are framed as mutual help, rather than when either action alone is framed positively. Together, the findings highlight the reciprocal structure of helping as a potential mechanism underlying framing effects in cooperation.



Best regards,
Yaoyao