Rhys (also from Roote) here. Agree with Brendon that there isn’t too much literature evaluating the “efficacy of various governance models”. Some links you may want to look into, Holden:
(This is less about academic research and more about IRL experiments.)
On the non-crypto side, Rob Reich has great thoughts on this. I found this convo between him and Stuart Russell re legitimacy and AI governance helpful. (49:30)
In the spirit of your final experimental point: Long term, I do think a lot of this will just be understood (and computationally modeled) as social groups (bounded by a Markov Blanket) abiding by the Free Energy Principle / Active Inference with Bayesian generative models, co-evolving into evolutionarily stable strategies. But we’re not there yet! 🙂
Rhys (also from Roote) here. Agree with Brendon that there isn’t too much literature evaluating the “efficacy of various governance models”. Some links you may want to look into, Holden:
(This is less about academic research and more about IRL experiments.)
Lots of governance experiments are happening with DAOs in crypto. See Vitalik’s back and forth here: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1442039126606311427
Or my response here. I find it helpful to visualize these systems: https://twitter.com/RhysLindmark/status/1446276859109335040 and https://www.rhyslindmark.com/popper-criterion-for-politics/ . Those pieces contain lots of political economy books like The Dictator’s Handbook. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11612989
More crypto stuff: https://gnosisguild.mirror.xyz/OuhG5s2X5uSVBx1EK4tKPhnUc91Wh9YM0fwSnC8UNcg. These are interchangeable “Modules” that DAOs can use like DeGov. https://otherinter.net/research/ is doing research on DAO governance as well.
On the non-crypto side, Rob Reich has great thoughts on this. I found this convo between him and Stuart Russell re legitimacy and AI governance helpful. (49:30)
Worth differentiating how much groups disagree on what should be (goals) vs. what is (current state). https://twitter.com/RhysLindmark/status/1294107741246517248
This feels close to the work Ian David-Moss et al are doing here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/effective-institutions-project
Many of the governance issues take the form of one of Meadow’s “system traps” https://bytepawn.com/systems-thinking.html#:~:text=Thinking%20in%20Systems%2C%20written%20by,furnace%20to%20a%20social%20system.
In the spirit of your final experimental point: Long term, I do think a lot of this will just be understood (and computationally modeled) as social groups (bounded by a Markov Blanket) abiding by the Free Energy Principle / Active Inference with Bayesian generative models, co-evolving into evolutionarily stable strategies. But we’re not there yet! 🙂
Beyond social choice theory, not sure there’s a better field you’re looking for. Maybe Political Economy, Public Choice Theory, or Game Theory? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anywho, good luck and excited to see what you unearth!