Congratulations Dr. Li Junyi
- Post by: Jungpil Hahn
- March 9, 2026
- No Comment
Another garbage can successfully manufactured — this one studying how decentralized garbage cans actually make decisions.
Today, Li Junyi successfully defended his dissertation entitled “The Future of Decentralization: Coordination Mechanisms and Favorable Boundaries”.
His work focuses on decentralization and collective intelligence in IT-enabled organizing and examines two foundational questions — 1. How do decentralized organizations make decisions? and 2. How does distributed expertise shape problem solving in crowds?
Through computational modeling of DAO-like governance, Junyi shows that decentralized decision systems oscillate between belief divergence and consensus formation, revealing a fundamental tension in how knowledge is aggregated across autonomous actors. And by extending parallel search theory he demonstrates that heterogeneity in knowledge structures fundamentally changes how search unfolds — meaning that scaling participation alone does not guarantee better solutions.
Taken together, Junyi’s dissertation reframes decentralization not as a simple trade-off with centralization, but as a knowledge aggregation challenge. It offers new theoretical insights and design levers for DAO governance, crowdsourcing systems, and collective intelligence platforms.
I’m very proud of Junyi and grateful to have been part of his journey.
Huge thanks go to Heng Cheng Suang and Shi-Ying L. for their excellent comments as examiners and for Li Gujie for chairing the defense.
Congratulations Dr. Li!
“Just because you’re trash doesn’t mean you can’t do great things — it’s called Garbage Can, not Garbage Cannot!”