Research

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• “What Kinds of Incentives Encourage Participation in Democracy? Evidence from a Massive Online Governance Experiment.” Forthcoming, Political Science Research and Methods. (with Andrew Hall) [PDF] [Stanford GSB article] [Yale ISPS article]

• 2024. “Public Opinion on Trading with the Enemy: Trade’s Effects on the Risk of War.” Journal of Peace Research. (with Celeste Beesley) [PDF] [Replication data]

Under Review

• “How the Rhetoric of Women in the Alt-Right Broadens the Movement’s Appeal.” (with Richard Nielsen) [PDF]

• 2023. “Open Problems in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.” (with Joshua Tan and 22 others) [arXiv]

Working Papers

• “When Power Doesn’t Participate: The Myth and Reality of Centralized Control in Blockchain Governance.” (with Austin Jang) [EC25 (ACM Conference on Economics and Computation) poster]

• “Decentralized Funding Mechanisms: Evidence from the Field.” (with Ian Appel, Jillian Grennan, and Larry Wu)

• “The Effects of Deliberation on Efficacy, Trust, and Political Participation: Experimental Evidence from Online Governance”

• “What Drives Participation in Digital Governance? Evidence from a Multi-stage Voter Mobilization Experiment”

• “Barriers and Drivers of Adoption in Emerging Markets: Online Text Data across 46 African Countries, Face-to-Face Survey Data from 250 Ghanaian Firms, and Interview Evidence from 22 Ghanaian Policymakers and Regulators.” (with Emmanuel Aikins Abakah and Mohammad Abdullah)

• “Openness to Learning Among Non-State Actors: Two Global Field Experiments Encouraging NGOs to Update.” (with Daniel Nielson, James Hodgson, and Michael Findley)

Other Writing

• 2025. “Futarchy v1 Preliminary Findings.” Optimism Governance Forum. [Link]

• 2025. “Experimenting with Futarchy* for Optimism Grant Allocation Decisions.” Optimism Governance Forum. [Link]

• 2025. “Did OP Airdrop 5 Increase User Retention Rates? A Regression Discontinuity Analysis.” Optimism Governance Forum. (with Thomas Bialek, Chuxin Huang, and Andrew Hall) [Link]

• 2024. “When is Deliberation Useful for Optimism Governance?” Optimism Governance Forum. [Link]

• 2024. “Research and Experimentation at Optimism.” Optimism Gov Docs. [Link]

• 2024. “The web3 Governance Lab: Using DAOs to Study Political Institutions and Behavior at Scale.” a16z crypto. (with Andrew Hall) [Link]

• 2024. “DAO Research: A Roadmap for Experimenting with Governance.” a16z crypto. (with Andrew Hall) [Link]

• 2023. “Designing Reward Systems for Web3 Governance.” a16z crypto. [Link]