Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Publication
    Decision Problems in Blockchain Systems: old wine in new bottles of walking in someone else shoes?
    Blockchain technology comes with the promise of being a disruptive technology with the potential for novel ways of interaction in a wide range of applications. Following broader application, scholarly interest in the technology is growing, though an extensive analysis of blockchain applications from a governance perspective is lacking to date. This research pays special attention to the governance of blockchain systems and illustrates decision problems in 14 blockchain systems from four application domains. Based on academic literature, semi-structured interviews with representatives from those organizations, and content analysis of grey literature, common problems in blockchain governance have been singled out and contextualized. Studying their enactment revealed their relevance to major organizational theories in what we labelled “Patrolling the borders”, “External Legitimation”, “Reduction of Discretionality”, and “Temporal Management”. The identification of these problems enriches the scarce body of knowledge on the governance of blockchain systems, resulting in a better understanding of how blockchain governance links to existing concepts and how it is enacted in practice.
    Scopus© Citations 75  922
  • Publication
    Buyers of 'Lemons': How can a Blockchain Platform Address Buyers’ Needs in the Market for ‘Lemons’?
    The second-hand automotive market is one with the least trust from consumers. Customers on the second-hand car market suffer from such problems as the car being in worse condition than initially indicated, accident damage that is not disclosed, fraud, etc. Akerlof, described the market for used cars as an example of the problem of information asymmetries and resulting quality uncertainty. In order to cope with quality uncertainties, used car buyers actively engage themselves in information seeking. Blockchain technology promises to automatize the tracking of cars through their lifecycles and provide reliable information at any point in time it is needed. In our study, we investigate the problems car buyers face during information seeking and propose requirements for the design of a blockchain-based system to address these.
      809Scopus© Citations 13
  • Publication
    Tribal Governance: The Business of Blockchain Authentication
    (Urban Centre for Computation and Data, 2018-01-06) ; ; ;
    The blockchain technology offers a novel mode of distributed authentication, which does not depend on a central authority. We consider this novelty against established governance modes. We illustrate our argument by paying special attention to blockchain-based authentication functions in the empirical domain of land registries across the world. Based on interviews with representatives from organizations deploying blockchain, and content analysis of related grey literature, we discuss established governance idealtypes against what the rivalry that cryptocurrencies and blockchains bring to digital settings. After referring to market, hierarchy, network, and bazaar, we conclude outlining the prospects of a different, blockchain-related governance mode called ‘tribal’ that better captures the ‘togetherness’ which rivalry originates.
      948
  • Publication
    Exploring Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Towards Shared Interests and ‘Code is Constitution’
    In recent years, scholarly interest research on blockchain technology steadily increased. While the underlying technology matures, observed problems in the field show questions of governance to remain crucial, even though scarcely studied empirically. One approach of solving these problems can be seen in decentralized autonomous organizations, which describes a new type of organizing that is grounded on consensus-based, distributed autonomy. The governance peculiarities of DAOs is fairly unexplored, and this is where this research commences. In an exploratory multiple case study consisting of three popular DAOs Aragon, Tezos, and DFINITY, their governance peculiarities are worked out by analyzing grey literature to understand stakeholder interests, incentivization, control, and coordination mechanisms, technical considerations, and external influences from off-chain entities. In the context of an on-and-off-chain continuum, it appears that DAOs provide mechanisms that might enable autonomous decision-making but, at the same time, find themselves strongly influenced by the interests of various stakeholders.
      182
  • Publication
    Hanseatic Governance: Understanding Blockchain as Organizational Technology
    Blockchain technology provides a distributed ledger and is based on a logic of peer to peer authentication. It gained prominence with the rise of cryptocurrencies but provides a much broader field of possible applications. While it has been originally closely linked to a libertarian agenda rejecting organizations, its developments have illustrated that this ideological framing is being reversed in practice. Based on contrastive empirical cases, the purpose of our paper is to discuss blockchain as an organizational technology. Its peculiar mode of governance, which we name ‘Hanseatic’, needs to mediate between the fluidity typical of Free and Open Source Software development and the immutability that use organizations adopt blockchain for.
      272