About this episode
Brett Falk (University of Pennsylvania) and Gerry Tsoukalas (Boston University) discuss voting protocols in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Brett Falk (University of Pennsylvania) and Gerry Tsoukalas (Boston University) highlight weaknesses in existing voting protocols. An important point is that many voting protocols weight votes based on token holdings but a voter’s token holdings does not, in general, reflect the level of information that the voter has with regard to a voting proposal. The consequence of this misalignment between a voter’s weight and a voter’s information is suboptimal welfare outcomes.
Paper: Token-Weighted Crowdsourcing and Balancing Power in Decentralized Governance
Guests
Brett Falk
Research professor, computer and information sciences, at the University of Pennsylvania.
Gerry Tsoukalas
Associate Professor, Boston University.
Andreas Park
Professor of Finance, University of Toronto.
Fahad Saleh
Associate Professor of Finance and the Nunnenkamp-Cinelli Faculty Fellow at Wake Forest University.
About our guest
Brett Falk is a Professor in Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the director of the Crypto and Society Lab, which focuses on 1) privacy and security in digital environments, 2) facilitating transparency and trust. He has published extensively in the field of cryptography, coding theory and network analysis. Professor Falk also teaches a highly popular course on Blockchain technology for Penn’s Master’s in Computing and Information Technology program. He received his Sc.B. in mathematics from Brown University, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from UCLA.
Gerry Tsoukalas is a Professor in the Information Systems department at Boston University, Questrom School of Business, a Senior Fellow of the Wharton School, Visiting Professor at IMD Switzerland, and a research fellow of Cornell University’s FinTech Initiative. He specializes in digital platforms and analytics. His scholarly work is widely published and has received numerous research awards. He holds Associate Editor positions at Management Science and M&SOM, and serves as a Guest Editor for the Journal of Operations Management. With over a decade of teaching experience, he has led undergraduate, MBA, and executive MBA courses in Business and Data Analytics (machine learning) at Boston University, Wharton, and Columbia Business School, receiving awards for teaching excellence.