8. Decision-making in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)

This chapter provides insights about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and their role as a self-governing and transparent form of organization based on blockchain technology while discussing the most recent developments and research of decision-making within DAOs. After an introduction to DAOs, describing basic elements and designs, the second part of this chapter will focus on governance aspects and describe how decision-making is implemented from the proposal process to voting and execution in DAOs. By discussing some issues and challenges of these decision-making processes that can be observed in practice, this chapter gives an overview on different voting mechanisms in DAOs that try to tackle some of these issues and challenges with different technical implementations. Overall, the chapter provides a better understanding for DAOs and summarizes main insights and key aspects for future research and practice.