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a16zcrypto.com/

web3 governance and democracy both grapple with getting people to vote. For @a16zcrypto, Ethan BdM and I explore how projects could reward people for participating in a way that would be hard in the physical world but is easier with blockchain…

https://a16zcrypto.com/paying-people-to-participate-in-governance/

I study decentralized governance @ Stanford GSB & a16z crypto 

andrewbenjaminhall.com

We lay out a direct revelation mechanism that makes it rational for voters to honestly report how much they would need to be rewarded in order to vote. This lets projects pay rewards efficiently—paying only as much as required to secure the level of participation they desire.

Also, if a project tested this out, the resulting data would give a measure of every respondent’s cost of voting, and whether and how they voted. This could help researchers assess whether the costs of voting deter participants who would have different governance preferences.

There is a natural concern that simply rewarding participation could lead to bad incentives, with people or bots voting just to reap rewards. Our next post will explore this issue.

Would love to hear suggestions on ways to mitigate the problem of uninformed participation, and any other comments on this work! Big thanks to Tim Roughgarden and Tim Sullivan for comments and suggestions on this piece.  (end)

Lots of mathematical details are available in the write-up.