Voters' Preferences and the Willingness to Pay for Voting Rights: New Evidence from Decentralized Finance

Romain Rossello, Stefano Balietti, Stefan Kitzler and Pietro Saggese
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Romain Rossello: HEC Paris
Stefano Balietti: University of Mannheim - Business School
Stefan Kitzler: Complexity Science Hub Vienna; AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH
Pietro Saggese: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca

No 1627, HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris

Abstract: While corporate governance theory predicts substantial voter-level heterogeneity in the willingness to pay for voting rights, empirical evidence has remained scarce due to data limitations and limited governance proposal heterogeneity in traditional finance. We use the new laboratory that is the governance of Decentralized Finance platforms where governance proposals are high-frequency and span a wide set of subjects to analyze over individual 230,000 votes and bring new supporting evidence of how voters' preferences shape the distribution of voters' willingness to pay for voting rights. Voters opposing the status quo are willing to pay significantly more for voting power, with large variations across proposal subjects. Through a novel vote-level measure of the probability of being pivotal, we confirm untested recent corporate governance theory predictions that increasing pivotality fundamentally reshapes how preferences are valued, amplifying, attenuating, and even reversing average effects on the willingness to pay for voting rights. At the proposal level, we recover established corporate governance results to further validate our new laboratory.

Keywords: Shareholder Voting; Corporate Governance; Decentralized Finance (DeFi); Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D79 G34 L17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 100 pages
Date: 2026-03-19
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebg:heccah:1627

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.6313439

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