Behavioral tokenomics: Myopic voting and token-weighted governance

Abstract

Crowdsourcing-based decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) often aggregate members’ information and beliefs through token-weighted voting. Existing research shows that token-weighted voting erodes information aggregation when members vote myopically, whereas strategic members adjust the weight on their private signals inversely to their token holdings to unravel the weighting mechanism. We test voters’ behavior in a controlled experiment, finding that participants vote myopically, conservatively weighting their private signals, and that the voting mechanism does not influence their propensity to act strategically. Our results provide an important first step in developing a behavioral understanding of DAOs.