DISA Brownbag Seminar — Junyi Li

Title: Why DAOs?: Organizational Learning through Digital Consensus

Abstract:
Recent advances in digital technologies (DT) have powered the emergence of highly decentralized governance modes, such as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Despite the dispute between decentralization and centralization recurs in organizational design literature, research on how DT facilitates organizational evolution remains sparse. We theorize DAOs as a distant descendant of the group decision support system (GDSS), which has an ex-ante allocation of decision rights and a programmatic approach of belief coordination and leverages digital consensus as a coordination principle. Based on a series of agent-based simulations, we provide an analytical framework to examine the nature of digital consensus and the performance of GDSS under digital eco-dynamics. These insights contribute to rethinking organizational learning in the presence of DT and can aid our understanding of how to design a digital artifact to improve organizational performance.