← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2607.09435 · v2
Voting Biases in Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) Governance
首次提交 2026-07-10 22:01
版本更新 2026-11-04 00:00
雷达观测 2026-11-04 23:39
摘要
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) replace formal managerial authority with collective decision-making, by handing both proposal rights and token-weighted votes directly to community members. Yet, as in corporate votes, where management sets the agenda and its proposals rarely fail, DAO votes are strikingly one-sided. Using 127 281 proposals and about 51 million votes cast on Snapshot, the leading off-chain DAO voting platform, between 2020 and 2023, we ask which features of the ballot are associated with this support. We relate each choice's voting-power share to three observable features: its position in the list, whether its stance expresses approval, and whether the proposal author selected it. Each identifies one voting bias: position bias, approval bias, and author-selected choice bias. Author-selected choices show the strongest and most robust association, receiving a voting-power share 58.8 percentage points higher than non-author-selected ones, compared with 27.1 percentage points for approving choices and 7.7 percentage points for first-listed ones. About one third of the author bias comes from the author's own voting power; that advantage is smaller in the largest protocols and in proposals with higher participation. The results are robust across alternative specifications and outcomes. Our findings suggest that the agenda power that management holds in corporate voting persists even without a formal hierarchy, and that ballot design and the visibility of proposers' preferences are governance choices rather than neutral implementation details.
观测到的版本
相邻记录可能跳过中间版本；首次发现 v2 及以上也会标为版本更新。
v2 · 2026-11-04 00:00 · 最新观测版本
Voting Biases in Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) Governance
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) replace formal managerial authority with collective decision-making, by handing both proposal rights and token-weighted votes directly to community members. Yet, as in corporate votes, where management sets the agenda and its proposals rarely fail, DAO votes are strikingly one-sided. Using 127 281 proposals and about 51 million votes cast on Snapshot, the leading off-chain DAO voting platform, between 2020 and 2023, we ask which features of the ballot are associated with this support. We relate each choice's voting-power share to three observable features: its position in the list, whether its stance expresses approval, and whether the proposal author selected it. Each identifies one voting bias: position bias, approval bias, and author-selected choice bias. Author-selected choices show the strongest and most robust association, receiving a voting-power share 58.8 percentage points higher than non-author-selected ones, compared with 27.1 percentage points for approving choices and 7.7 percentage points for first-listed ones. About one third of the author bias comes from the author's own voting power; that advantage is smaller in the largest protocols and in proposals with higher participation. The results are robust across alternative specifications and outcomes. Our findings suggest that the agenda power that management holds in corporate voting persists even without a formal hierarchy, and that ballot design and the visibility of proposers' preferences are governance choices rather than neutral implementation details.
查看此版本解读 →查看此版本原文 ↗