Permission-less (or public) block-chain networks are a new form of decentralized private governan... more Permission-less (or public) block-chain networks are a new form of decentralized private governance in the digital sphere. Though legal scholars recognize the significance of law in the use of block-chain, existing research using legal and institutional perspectives leaves block-chain governance as something of a black box. We provide a more granular analysis, finding that block-chain governance operates on four distinct levels. Governance at the protocol layer involves discrete institutional design choices intended to constrain network members’ incentives in an ongoing sense. Subsidiary governance arises from the need for communities to draft protocol updates and from the fact that governance protocol design choices create discrete concentrations of political power within the network. Competitive governance forces arise because cryptocurrency networks are constrained by the possibility of exit of participants and users to other alternatives. Finally, in terms of superior governance, permission-less cryptocurrency participants and users are subject to a variety of laws and regulations due to how cryptocurrencies implicate property, contracts, tax, and securities law. Since the interaction of these governance aspects shapes the operation of any given network, legal and regulatory governance of block-chain ought to consider permission-less block-chains as confronting political and governance dilemmas much like any complex organization. Predicting the effect legal and regulatory treatment of permission-less block-chains requires an accurate understanding of the incentives of their members, all of which are greatly shaped by the governance forces we outline in detail here.
Property institutions should ideally provide economic actors with certainty that their local choi... more Property institutions should ideally provide economic actors with certainty that their local choices about investment will not be unsettled by shifting political economic equilibria. We argue that for this to occur, political autonomy, administrative and enforcement capacity, political constraints, and accessible legal institutions are each necessary. A comparison of the evolution of property rights for settlers and American Indians in the United States shows how political and legal forces shape the evolution of property institutions. American Indians, who had property institutions before Europeans arrived, could not defend their land from Europeans and later Americans due to lacking military capacity. Settlers' property rights were relatively secure because the government had sufficient autonomy and capacity to broadly define and enforce their rights, political institutions constrained the government from expropriating settlers' property, and legal institutions provided a forum for settlers to adjudicate and defend their rights in court. Native Americans, in contrast, had systematically inconsistent and often expropriative policy treatment by the government. Although tribes have technically been sovereign since the 1970s, tribal governments continue to lack sufficient political and legal autonomy and capacity to define and enforce property institutions in response to evolving local conditions.
Racial diversity among faculty, students, and administrators is increasing at universities in the... more Racial diversity among faculty, students, and administrators is increasing at universities in the United States. These changes have been uneven, with growth in underrepresented students exceeding that of faculty diversity. To address these and other inequities, a growing number of universities have established an executive‐level chief diversity officer (CDO). Our study offers a first empirical examination of this effort at selected 4‐year U.S. universities from 2001 to 2019 using unique data on the initial hiring date of a CDO and publicly available demographic data. We provide a comprehensive overview of demographic trends within our data and find confidence intervals around the estimated instantaneous average treatment effect for an executive‐level CDO on diverse hiring tightly contain zero. Estimated treatment effects are small and lack statistical significance within 4 years of a CDO position being established. We discuss other possible factors that explain trends toward higher diversity on campus and several possible constraints.
Permissionless blockchains have been described as a novel institutional building block for volunt... more Permissionless blockchains have been described as a novel institutional building block for voluntary economic exchange, with unique protocol features such as automated contract execution, high levels of network and process transparency, and uniquely distributed governance. We argue that conventional institutional economics analysis of blockchain networks is incomplete absent a more robust application of descriptive polycentric analysis. Though the distributed governance that permissionless blockchain protocols provide is novel, these networks nonetheless require ongoing coordination between stakeholders and are subject to competitive pressures much like other private organizations pursuing similar goals for a set of users who can choose among providers. We characterize change on blockchain networks as resulting from internal sources and external sources. These internal sources include constitutional (protocol) design and the related need for collective choice processes to update protocols. In addition to law and regulation, competitive pressure is itself a critical external source of governance. Predominantly through analysis of two leading cryptocurrency networks, Bitcoin and Ethereum, we illustrate how conceptualizing of blockchain as a polycentric enterprise enhances our predictive and descriptive understanding of these networks.
Institutional economists have analyzed permissionless blockchains as a novel institutional buildi... more Institutional economists have analyzed permissionless blockchains as a novel institutional building block for voluntary economic exchange and distributed governance, with their unique protocol features such as automated contract execution, high levels of network and process transparency, and uniquely distributed governance. But such institutional analysis needs to be complemented by polycentric analysis of how blockchains change. We characterize such change as resulting from internal sources and external sources. Internal sources include constitutional (protocol) design and collective-choice processes for updating protocols, which help coordinate network participants and users. External sources include competitive pressure from other cryptocurrency networks. By studying two leading networks, Bitcoin and Ethereum, we illustrate how conceptualizing blockchains as competing and constitutional polycentric enterprises clarifies their processes of change.
Permission-less (or public) block-chain networks are a new form of decentralized private governan... more Permission-less (or public) block-chain networks are a new form of decentralized private governance in the digital sphere. Though legal scholars recognize the significance of law in the use of block-chain, existing research using legal and institutional perspectives leaves block-chain governance as something of a black box. We provide a more granular analysis, finding that block-chain governance operates on four distinct levels. Governance at the protocol layer involves discrete institutional design choices intended to constrain network members’ incentives in an ongoing sense. Subsidiary governance arises from the need for communities to draft protocol updates and from the fact that governance protocol design choices create discrete concentrations of political power within the network. Competitive governance forces arise because cryptocurrency networks are constrained by the possibility of exit of participants and users to other alternatives. Finally, in terms of superior governance, permission-less cryptocurrency participants and users are subject to a variety of laws and regulations due to how cryptocurrencies implicate property, contracts, tax, and securities law. Since the interaction of these governance aspects shapes the operation of any given network, legal and regulatory governance of block-chain ought to consider permission-less block-chains as confronting political and governance dilemmas much like any complex organization. Predicting the effect legal and regulatory treatment of permission-less block-chains requires an accurate understanding of the incentives of their members, all of which are greatly shaped by the governance forces we outline in detail here.
Property institutions should ideally provide economic actors with certainty that their local choi... more Property institutions should ideally provide economic actors with certainty that their local choices about investment will not be unsettled by shifting political economic equilibria. We argue that for this to occur, political autonomy, administrative and enforcement capacity, political constraints, and accessible legal institutions are each necessary. A comparison of the evolution of property rights for settlers and American Indians in the United States shows how political and legal forces shape the evolution of property institutions. American Indians, who had property institutions before Europeans arrived, could not defend their land from Europeans and later Americans due to lacking military capacity. Settlers' property rights were relatively secure because the government had sufficient autonomy and capacity to broadly define and enforce their rights, political institutions constrained the government from expropriating settlers' property, and legal institutions provided a f...
Studies of blockchain governance can be divided into analyses of the governance of blockchains (s... more Studies of blockchain governance can be divided into analyses of the governance of blockchains (such as rules and power dynamics within a given network) and governance by blockchains (such as how blockchains can be implemented to improve self-governance of community-based peer production networks). Less emphasis has been placed on applications of distributed ledgers to public sector governance. Our review clarifies that the decentralization and distributive features that enable blockchains to link up loosely connected private organizations and public agencies to improve efficiency and transparency of government transactions. However, most blockchain applications lack clear advantages over the conventional digital recording of information. In addition, our review highlights that blockchain applications in public sector governance are potentially vast, though in most instances, the existing applications have not extended much beyond limited-scale pilots. We conclude with a call for th...
This paper investigates whether reported subjective importance of policy positions in surveys are... more This paper investigates whether reported subjective importance of policy positions in surveys are influential in citizens’ vote choices. We derive a novel estimation model from the canonical proximity voting literature and, in contrast to previous studies on this question, directly estimate the weights of policies from vote choices and avoid the common practice of treating the ordinal values as cardinal. Using this method, we find that citizens’ voting behavior is consistent with their reported ideology and subjective issue importance using 1996-2008 data from the American National Election Studies. We find that a one standard deviation change in the policies that are extremely important to the voters is associated with a 9.4 percentage point increase of voting for the more ideologically proximate candidate. The size of the effect is about half of that from identifying with the Democratic party and about a third of identifying with the Republican party. Substantively, these findings...
Permissionless blockchains have been described as a novel institutional building block for volunt... more Permissionless blockchains have been described as a novel institutional building block for voluntary economic exchange, with unique protocol features such as automated contract execution, high levels of network and process transparency, and uniquely distributed governance. We argue that conventional institutional economics analysis of blockchain networks is incomplete absent a more robust application of descriptive polycentric analysis. Though the distributed governance that permissionless blockchain protocols provide is novel, these networks nonetheless require ongoing coordination between stakeholders and are subject to competitive pressures much like other private organizations pursuing similar goals for a set of users who can choose among providers. We characterize change on blockchain networks as resulting from internal sources and external sources. These internal sources include constitutional (protocol) design and the related need for collective choice processes to update pro...
Permission-less (or public) block-chain networks are a new form of decentralized private governan... more Permission-less (or public) block-chain networks are a new form of decentralized private governance in the digital sphere. Though legal scholars recognize the significance of law in the use of block-chain, existing research using legal and institutional perspectives leaves block-chain governance as something of a black box. We provide a more granular analysis, finding that block-chain governance operates on four distinct levels. Governance at the protocol layer involves discrete institutional design choices intended to constrain network members’ incentives in an ongoing sense. Subsidiary governance arises from the need for communities to draft protocol updates and from the fact that governance protocol design choices create discrete concentrations of political power within the network. Competitive governance forces arise because cryptocurrency networks are constrained by the possibility of exit of participants and users to other alternatives. Finally, in terms of superior governance, permission-less cryptocurrency participants and users are subject to a variety of laws and regulations due to how cryptocurrencies implicate property, contracts, tax, and securities law. Since the interaction of these governance aspects shapes the operation of any given network, legal and regulatory governance of block-chain ought to consider permission-less block-chains as confronting political and governance dilemmas much like any complex organization. Predicting the effect legal and regulatory treatment of permission-less block-chains requires an accurate understanding of the incentives of their members, all of which are greatly shaped by the governance forces we outline in detail here.
Property institutions should ideally provide economic actors with certainty that their local choi... more Property institutions should ideally provide economic actors with certainty that their local choices about investment will not be unsettled by shifting political economic equilibria. We argue that for this to occur, political autonomy, administrative and enforcement capacity, political constraints, and accessible legal institutions are each necessary. A comparison of the evolution of property rights for settlers and American Indians in the United States shows how political and legal forces shape the evolution of property institutions. American Indians, who had property institutions before Europeans arrived, could not defend their land from Europeans and later Americans due to lacking military capacity. Settlers' property rights were relatively secure because the government had sufficient autonomy and capacity to broadly define and enforce their rights, political institutions constrained the government from expropriating settlers' property, and legal institutions provided a forum for settlers to adjudicate and defend their rights in court. Native Americans, in contrast, had systematically inconsistent and often expropriative policy treatment by the government. Although tribes have technically been sovereign since the 1970s, tribal governments continue to lack sufficient political and legal autonomy and capacity to define and enforce property institutions in response to evolving local conditions.
Racial diversity among faculty, students, and administrators is increasing at universities in the... more Racial diversity among faculty, students, and administrators is increasing at universities in the United States. These changes have been uneven, with growth in underrepresented students exceeding that of faculty diversity. To address these and other inequities, a growing number of universities have established an executive‐level chief diversity officer (CDO). Our study offers a first empirical examination of this effort at selected 4‐year U.S. universities from 2001 to 2019 using unique data on the initial hiring date of a CDO and publicly available demographic data. We provide a comprehensive overview of demographic trends within our data and find confidence intervals around the estimated instantaneous average treatment effect for an executive‐level CDO on diverse hiring tightly contain zero. Estimated treatment effects are small and lack statistical significance within 4 years of a CDO position being established. We discuss other possible factors that explain trends toward higher diversity on campus and several possible constraints.
Permissionless blockchains have been described as a novel institutional building block for volunt... more Permissionless blockchains have been described as a novel institutional building block for voluntary economic exchange, with unique protocol features such as automated contract execution, high levels of network and process transparency, and uniquely distributed governance. We argue that conventional institutional economics analysis of blockchain networks is incomplete absent a more robust application of descriptive polycentric analysis. Though the distributed governance that permissionless blockchain protocols provide is novel, these networks nonetheless require ongoing coordination between stakeholders and are subject to competitive pressures much like other private organizations pursuing similar goals for a set of users who can choose among providers. We characterize change on blockchain networks as resulting from internal sources and external sources. These internal sources include constitutional (protocol) design and the related need for collective choice processes to update protocols. In addition to law and regulation, competitive pressure is itself a critical external source of governance. Predominantly through analysis of two leading cryptocurrency networks, Bitcoin and Ethereum, we illustrate how conceptualizing of blockchain as a polycentric enterprise enhances our predictive and descriptive understanding of these networks.
Institutional economists have analyzed permissionless blockchains as a novel institutional buildi... more Institutional economists have analyzed permissionless blockchains as a novel institutional building block for voluntary economic exchange and distributed governance, with their unique protocol features such as automated contract execution, high levels of network and process transparency, and uniquely distributed governance. But such institutional analysis needs to be complemented by polycentric analysis of how blockchains change. We characterize such change as resulting from internal sources and external sources. Internal sources include constitutional (protocol) design and collective-choice processes for updating protocols, which help coordinate network participants and users. External sources include competitive pressure from other cryptocurrency networks. By studying two leading networks, Bitcoin and Ethereum, we illustrate how conceptualizing blockchains as competing and constitutional polycentric enterprises clarifies their processes of change.
Permission-less (or public) block-chain networks are a new form of decentralized private governan... more Permission-less (or public) block-chain networks are a new form of decentralized private governance in the digital sphere. Though legal scholars recognize the significance of law in the use of block-chain, existing research using legal and institutional perspectives leaves block-chain governance as something of a black box. We provide a more granular analysis, finding that block-chain governance operates on four distinct levels. Governance at the protocol layer involves discrete institutional design choices intended to constrain network members’ incentives in an ongoing sense. Subsidiary governance arises from the need for communities to draft protocol updates and from the fact that governance protocol design choices create discrete concentrations of political power within the network. Competitive governance forces arise because cryptocurrency networks are constrained by the possibility of exit of participants and users to other alternatives. Finally, in terms of superior governance, permission-less cryptocurrency participants and users are subject to a variety of laws and regulations due to how cryptocurrencies implicate property, contracts, tax, and securities law. Since the interaction of these governance aspects shapes the operation of any given network, legal and regulatory governance of block-chain ought to consider permission-less block-chains as confronting political and governance dilemmas much like any complex organization. Predicting the effect legal and regulatory treatment of permission-less block-chains requires an accurate understanding of the incentives of their members, all of which are greatly shaped by the governance forces we outline in detail here.
Property institutions should ideally provide economic actors with certainty that their local choi... more Property institutions should ideally provide economic actors with certainty that their local choices about investment will not be unsettled by shifting political economic equilibria. We argue that for this to occur, political autonomy, administrative and enforcement capacity, political constraints, and accessible legal institutions are each necessary. A comparison of the evolution of property rights for settlers and American Indians in the United States shows how political and legal forces shape the evolution of property institutions. American Indians, who had property institutions before Europeans arrived, could not defend their land from Europeans and later Americans due to lacking military capacity. Settlers' property rights were relatively secure because the government had sufficient autonomy and capacity to broadly define and enforce their rights, political institutions constrained the government from expropriating settlers' property, and legal institutions provided a f...
Studies of blockchain governance can be divided into analyses of the governance of blockchains (s... more Studies of blockchain governance can be divided into analyses of the governance of blockchains (such as rules and power dynamics within a given network) and governance by blockchains (such as how blockchains can be implemented to improve self-governance of community-based peer production networks). Less emphasis has been placed on applications of distributed ledgers to public sector governance. Our review clarifies that the decentralization and distributive features that enable blockchains to link up loosely connected private organizations and public agencies to improve efficiency and transparency of government transactions. However, most blockchain applications lack clear advantages over the conventional digital recording of information. In addition, our review highlights that blockchain applications in public sector governance are potentially vast, though in most instances, the existing applications have not extended much beyond limited-scale pilots. We conclude with a call for th...
This paper investigates whether reported subjective importance of policy positions in surveys are... more This paper investigates whether reported subjective importance of policy positions in surveys are influential in citizens’ vote choices. We derive a novel estimation model from the canonical proximity voting literature and, in contrast to previous studies on this question, directly estimate the weights of policies from vote choices and avoid the common practice of treating the ordinal values as cardinal. Using this method, we find that citizens’ voting behavior is consistent with their reported ideology and subjective issue importance using 1996-2008 data from the American National Election Studies. We find that a one standard deviation change in the policies that are extremely important to the voters is associated with a 9.4 percentage point increase of voting for the more ideologically proximate candidate. The size of the effect is about half of that from identifying with the Democratic party and about a third of identifying with the Republican party. Substantively, these findings...
Permissionless blockchains have been described as a novel institutional building block for volunt... more Permissionless blockchains have been described as a novel institutional building block for voluntary economic exchange, with unique protocol features such as automated contract execution, high levels of network and process transparency, and uniquely distributed governance. We argue that conventional institutional economics analysis of blockchain networks is incomplete absent a more robust application of descriptive polycentric analysis. Though the distributed governance that permissionless blockchain protocols provide is novel, these networks nonetheless require ongoing coordination between stakeholders and are subject to competitive pressures much like other private organizations pursuing similar goals for a set of users who can choose among providers. We characterize change on blockchain networks as resulting from internal sources and external sources. These internal sources include constitutional (protocol) design and the related need for collective choice processes to update pro...
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