When it comes to voting, the people who hate an idea are always willing to spend more money to kill it than the supporters are willing to spend to save it.
Using data from over 230,000 decentralized finance (DeFi) votes, researchers discovered that voters opposing the status quo have a significantly higher 'willingness to pay' for voting rights. They also found that the closer a vote is to being a tie-breaker, the more it fundamentally warps how much people are willing to spend to win.
Voters' Preferences and the Willingness to Pay for Voting Rights: New Evidence from Decentralized Finance
SSRN · 6313439
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 h