Essays on decentralized autonomous organizations: a multi-level investigation of price stability, market performance, and philanthropic implications

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) face a fundamental decentralization paradox: the characteristics that make them theoretically superior to existing hierarchical structures simultaneously undermine their practical effectiveness. This thesis investigates whether and how this paradox can be addressed through a multi-level analysis that encompasses price stability, market performance, and philanthropic implications. In doing so, this thesis aims to provide critical insights into DAOs, which are considered a new form of digital enterprise that facilitates collective action in managing digital commons. The thesis comprises three interconnected essays, each underpinned by a specific research question.The first essay investigates how non-traditional performance indicators impact DAO volatility. Unlike some DAOs, which issue decentralized stablecoins to maintain stable token prices, most DAOs are built on a native token basis, whose value depends entirely on the effectiveness of governance and the protocol’s future adoption. This means their prices are more exposed to speculative trading, making volatility a central concern for these DAOs. Under these circumstances, native DAOs that are not built on a stable mechanism must rely on relevant performance indicators to assess token price stability from an investment perspective. However, non-traditional performance indicators, such as social media and wealth inequality, are not typically included when measuring the riskiness of crypto assets. Based on several econometric models and robustness checks (e.g., MM-type, GMM, and entropy balancing), the findings show that both social media dominance and wealth inequality significantly reduce DAO volatility. Drawing on herding behavior and equity theories, the concepts of digital elites and stability pacts demonstrate that strategic recentralization enhances price stability and enables the development of novel DAO risk assessment frameworks. This essay recognizes the relevance of social media dominance and wealth inequality as non-traditional performance indicators for predicting DAO volatility and can help establish a risk assessment framework that crypto investors can rely on when making informed decisions. The second essay examines the impact of ownership concentration and duration on the performance of DAO markets. Using several econometric models and robustness checks (e.g., GLS, GMM, and PSM), the findings reveal a positive and significant impact of ownership concentration and duration across categories on DAO market performance. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the average ownership duration has a significant positive impact, whereas ownership concentration has a significant negative impact on DAO market performance. Drawing on participatory governance and social exchange theories, this essay proposes an optimal governance equilibrium model to enhance and sustain DAO market performance. Overall, this essay offers novel insights into how the token-holders’ commitment mitigates decentralization's operational inefficiencies.The third essay examines the application of DAOs in the charity sector and aims to deepen the understanding of crypto donors' perceptions of this technology. Improving transparency and trust in the charity sector is crucial, as donors increasingly seek new ways to monitor and verify their contributions. Specifically, this essay examines Maxity, the world's first Web3 Social Impact protocol that contributes to the 17 UN SDGs. By adopting a netnography approach and using UMAP, HDBSCAN, and BERTopic — three unsupervised machine learning models — this essay identified four latent dimensions related to DAO-based charitable activities. These findings reveal how donors perceive DAO as an effective channel for contributing to charitable causes, enabling greater transparency, faster donation delivery, cost-effectiveness, and increased trustworthiness. Furthermore, the concept of sociotechnical governance was introduced to theorize how DAO-enabled NFTs reshape institutional trust and refine traditional charity governance paradigms. This essay contributes to the expanding discussion on DAOs as an innovative channel for organizing and responding rapidly to humanitarian crises.