Tokenized Ownership in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Evidence from Steemit

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) operate on an incentive network powered by crypto tokens, which are attached with payment rights (i.e., transactional tokens) and ownership rights (i.e., governance tokens). Tokenized ownership is a special incentive way that supports automated operations of DAOs. Our study focuses on this new incentive scheme and construct a quasi-experiment setting to empirically test the incentive effects of tokenized ownership. We find that the intended choice of governance tokens leads to higher post length and readability and higher curation quality compared with transactional tokens. This study contributes to the literature of blockchain and cryptocurrency from an operational perspective and provides practical suggestions for the design of incentive mechanisms in DAOs