Introduction: Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are an emerging organizational form that operates entirely on blockchain infrastructure. Within a DAO, organizational governance rules are hardcoded in transparent and immutable smart contracts. In principle, these rules are intended to facilitate decentralized decision-making among token holders who collectively create, discuss, and vote on proposals that govern the organization. Despite their promise, the extent to which DAOs achieve true decentralization in practice remains unclear. This study addresses an underexplored area in the literature by empirically investigating key aspects of DAO governance, particularly the degree of decentralization and participant composition.Method: Network analysis is used to examine proposal voting coalitions among participants as a proxy for decentralization. Sentiment analysis is employed to assess trust among participants. The analysis draws on data from 54 DAOs, including 774 unique proposals and 13,085 associated token holder comments.Results: The findings indicate that DAOs may not achieve the level of decentralization originally envisioned. Moreover, decentralization and participant composition within governance structures play a critical role in shaping trust, voting participation, and overall financial performance in DAOs PracticalImplications: Although current voting mechanisms aim to reduce the dominance of large token holders (whales), DAOs may still fall short of the level of decentralization originally envisioned. Accordingly, more advanced voting mechanisms may be required to further mitigate coordination and strategic behavior in proposal voting. In addition, DAOs could benefit from adjusting the threshold requirements for the Foundation to improve accessibility for token holders and encourage broader participation. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) may also help streamline the voting process and improve the clarity of proposals.
Responses to surveys eliciting evaluations of trust in government, both generally and in specific areas, have varied over time and across countries.Using consistent survey data for 34 OECD countries from 2007-2023, we estimate a model of factors determining levels of trust.We employ a series of econometric techniques of increasing sophistication.The level and growth rate of real income per capita, social spending per capita, the degree of decentralization, and economic freedom all exert positive effects on trust.Inflation, unemployment, and debt per capita negatively affect trust.Additionally, higher levels of human capital and the elderly share of the population negatively affect trust.In the context of trust in government, the estimates suggest a heavier weight on inflation than on unemployment when compared to Okun's misery index, which weights them equally.Additionally, the estimates are used to evaluate combinations of policies, e.g.debt-financed increases in social spending that affect inflation and/or unemployment, to determine the net effect on trust in government.
Web3 and DeFi are widely advocated as innovations for greater financial inclusion and democratization. We assemble the most comprehensive dataset to date on the largest Web3 ecosystem and use large-scale computing to investigate the claim. We discuss Ethereum's network structure, time trends, and distributions of transactions, mining, and ownership. Mining income and Ether ownership are concentrated in a few nodes, even after excluding exchange and mining pool wallets, with inequalities more exacerbated than observed in the real economy. Network activities are dominated by large transactions, shifting from peer-to-peer to user-DApps/DeFi interactions, and from Ether-based to ERC-20-token-based. High percentage transaction fees, congestion-induced gas-price fluctuation, suboptimal reserve setting, and large return volatility of tokens disproportionally harm small, unsophisticated, and new nodes, with high failure rates hurting all users. Finally, we present causal evidence that base-fee burning mechanisms (e.g., EIP-1559) and airdrop programs (e.g., OmiseGo Airdrop) promote inclusion and equality through monetary redistribution.
This chapter begins with an analytic definition of the collective action organization. Collective action organizations seek nonmarket solutions to individual or group problems. Collective action organizations usually have mechanisms for mass membership involvement in internal decision making. The potential for minority control and abuse of collective resources remains as much a threat in nominally democratic associations as in more overtly hierarchical firms and bureaus. Civil associations preserve civilization against barbarism; that is, against the disappearance of individual liberty and freedom. In order for societal freedom and liberty to prevail, intermediate groups must be autonomous and substantially self-governing. The fundamental issue in organizational governance is the distribution and legitimation of power among a collectivity’s participants. Public policy-making is the result of many social group forces, exerted by collective action organizations, that reach equilibrium in a decentralized but consensual democratic polity. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
The decentralization of school governanceâoften blended with market dynamicsâhas become a prominent strategy for lifting the performance of urban schools. This approach rests upon several assumptions, primarily that freedom from bureaucratic regulation will strengthen teacher community and result in more effective allocation of instructional resources. But do small autonomous high schools host such favorable social-organizational features? What drives collaborative relationships among teachers in decentralized schools? And do these relations help to account for between-school and between-teacher variation in teacher trust and shared responsibility for student learning? To examine these core questions I draw on social network theory as a theoretical frame and build from the literature on the social organization of efficacious schools. Survey data were collected from 392 teachers in 20 small site-managed charter and pilot high schools located in Los Angeles. First, I used p2 network modeling to determine the extent to which a teacherâs position in the school organization and personal characteristics predicted their instructional support relationships. Second, to examine the influence of these instructional support relationships on a teacherâs perceptions of normative culture in their schools, I estimated hierarchical linear models (HLM) estimating collective responsibility and relational trust as functions of teacher position in the school organization, teacher personal characteristics, and teacher- and school-level network measures of the instructional support relationships.Teachersâ choice of colleagues to whom they turn for support to improve their teaching practice reflected not only leadersâ efforts to shape teacher collaboration, but also preferences for forming ties with a colleague based on their personal characteristics. Teachers were more likely to seek advice to improve their teaching practice from colleagues who taught the same subject. However, teachers were less likely to seek advice from the more experienced teachers in the school. The likelihood of an instructional advice relationship was greater when teachers were of the same race. Teachersâ perceptions of normative culture were influenced by the distribution of these social resources in the school, in that uneven distribution of advice and support relationships was detrimental for a sense of shared responsibility for student learning but conducive to a high level of trust in the group. For individual teachers, their collaborative activity conditioned the perceptions further: those teachers most often approached for support by colleagues held weaker perceptions of the groupâs overall shared responsibility. This approach advances the study of teacher professional community to incorporate the âdyadâ as a focus, honing in on an essential building block of cohesive social organizations. The study also demonstrates meaningful variation among teachers within the same school in how they perceive normative culture. The findings contribute to the literature on teacher professional community and have implications for policymakers, districts and school leaders.
From the three city groups of Peal Triangle,Yangze Triangle and Pan-Bosea to the organic diffusion of Pan-Pearl Triangle,Pan-Yangze Triangle and Large Bo-sea Encirlement,the thesis holds that it is on the basis oftwo overall situationstrategy and polarization and diffusion law and it is the way to realize the rising of China.The thesis also holds that the rising of the three city groups depends on the finance decentralization reform,so from therising triangleto theharmonious trianglestill breaks through from the finance reform which means to establish regional horizontal financial equilibrium system to achieve equal public service predicated on the improvement of efficiency.The thesis tries to settle the problem of measurement standard of financial capacity distribution among governments through the hypothesis and demonstration on standard person after getting rid of the unreal reason of the statistics of permanent residents.
In response to the growing critique of decentralized and participatory approaches to development, the article develops a theoretical framework for analyzing the relationship between community-based planning and poverty. Building on contributions from research on collective action, social capital, and social movements, the framework identifies a series of variables that are theorized to affect a community's capacity to alleviate poverty. Using this framework, three community-level case studies in Oaxaca, Mexico are analyzed. All three communities are characterized by a decline in subsistence agriculture, increasing out-migration, and the use of remittances to finance community-based planning projects. The article documents each community's capacity to alleviate the material manifestations of poverty. It concludes that only the community with the strongest capacity for community-level collective action was capable of planning independent of the state, and thus in a position to take incipient steps toward addressing poverty's structural causes. The findings call into question the often assumed desirability of collaborative planning and support the need for a more nuanced understanding of the strengths and limitations of distinct forms of community-based planning interpreted within broader socio-political contexts.
Abstract Recent changes in the global business environment have radically increased the demands which businesses have to fulfil to stay in the competitive race. Firms in the advanced countries are facing tremendous challenges from a number of sources: demands for enhanced quality and variability of goods and constant innovation in product development; severe price competition from low-wage countries; and much increased costs of new technology. Some of these demands are also beginning to impinge on newly industrializing societies (NIS). To cope with these new challenges, firms have begun to implement organizational innovations within firms and in their relations with other firms. Among the latter, relational contracting, networks, strategic alliances and horizontal co-operation in industrial districts have become particularly prevalent (Piorc and Sabel 1984; Powell 1990; Ring and van de Ven 1992; Alter and Hage 1993; Sydow 1996). Within organizations, networking, semi-autonomous working groups, and reciprocity are also accorded new importance (Rajan, van Eupen, and Jaspers 1997: 36; Turner and Auer 1994), as are forms of organizational decentralization of responsibility.