Author ORCID Identifier
Ali Ahmed: 0009-0002-9932-9078
Abstract
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) typically govern collective decisions through token-based voting rather than centralized authority. To address participation inequality, many DAOs allow members to delegate their voting rights to other participants. While delegation is widely promoted as a governance mechanism that improves participation and representation, little is known about how delegated voting power shapes individual voting behavior during the decision-making process. Drawing on principal-agent and accountability theory, we examine whether delegated voting power facilitates independent judgment or conformity with the leading outcomes during DAO voting. Using fine-grained voting data from a leading DAO, we find that voters with greater delegated voting power are significantly more likely to support the current leading outcome, whereas personal voting power is not associated with such behavior. We further find that delegated voting power is associated with reduced opposition when rejection is leading, but has no significant effect when approval is leading. Our findings also reveal that greater delegated voting power is associated with earlier participation, and earlier participation increases the likelihood of supporting the leading outcome. Overall, our findings show that delegated voting power operates as an accountability mechanism that encourages conformity and may induce centralization in decentralized governance systems.
Recommended Citation
Ahmed, A. (In press). Vote Delegation and Conformity in DAO Governance. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 59, pp-pp. Retrieved from https://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol59/iss1/58
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