Voters' preferences and the willingness to pay for voting rights: new evidence from decentralized finance

While corporate governance theory predicts substantial voter-level heterogeneity in the willingness to pay for voting rights, empirical evidence has remained scarce due to data limitations and limited governance proposal heterogeneity in traditional finance. We use the new laboratory that is the governance of Decentralized Finance platforms where governance proposals are high-frequency and span a wide set of subjects to analyze over individual 230,000 votes and bring new supporting evidence of how voters’ preferences shape the distribution of voters’ willingness to pay for voting rights. Voters opposing the status quo are willing to pay significantly more for voting power, with large variations across proposal subjects. Through a novel vote-level measure of the probability of being pivotal, we confirm untested recent corporate governance theory predictions that increasing pivotality fundamentally reshapes how preferences are valued, amplifying, attenuating, and even reversing average effects on the willingness to pay for voting rights. At the proposal level, we recover established corporate governance results to further validate our new laboratory.