Work for Decentralised Autonomous Organisation: What Empirical Labour Economics Can Tell Us about the Decentralised Digital Workforce

Abstract

A decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) is a new type of digitally native organisation with a membership base that has been rapidly growing throughout 2022. A new organisational structure also leads to a new way labour is organised, hired, demanded and supplied. There are, however, some differences in human capital accumulation and employee decision-making. These issues fall in the domain of labour economics. Existing theories of labour economics are tested on conventional labour market data. However, DAO work differs from the traditional post-industrial labour market employer-employee relationship. It can be described as a hybrid of ownership, volunteering, freelancing and traditional employment in different proportions for different people. Whether those differences change how the labour market operates in DAOs needs to be examined. To understand this, we need more information on DAO workers, specifically labour and socio-economic survey data, which needs to be collected. This paper identifies the need for a large-scale survey of DAO workers, discusses the motivation and challenges of data collection specific to DAOs and some important labour economic policy questions that DAOs might face in the near future that rely on empirical data. Next, the paper critically reviews and summarises the existing small-scale data on work for DAO parameters. Lastly, the article outlines issues with empirical data collection and why current methods should be modified to gather and analyse economic data on DAO work. Overall, the paper aims to determine the way ahead for the applied labour economic analysis of DAO labour.