Document Type
Book Chapter
Book Authors/Editors
David Gindis
Publisher
Cambridge University Press, forthcoming
Publication Date
2025
Abstract
This chapter evaluates the autonomous business entity of the 21st century, embodied in the decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, as a case study of knowledge commons. DAOs rely primarily on socio-technical infrastructures supplied by blockchain technology rather than on human-and-law corporate governance based on human beings and law. As systems for resource governance within financial and commercial contexts, DAOs ostensibly improve entity decision making at scale by reducing or even eliminating weaknesses implicit in reliance on human judgment.
Because DAOs consist substantially of combinations of shared computer code and shared data, we consider them using the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) research framework. We contrast the GKC perspective with long-standing views of the corporate form as representing one among several related modes of resource governance: as a nexus of contracts, as an instance of hierarchy and decision theory, and as a complex system. We situate our analysis in the context of earlier work on the corporation as commons. The chapter concludes that the GKC framework focuses attention on elements of governance that often are not salient in conventional accounts of the corporation: how governance responds to and generates social dilemmas associated specifically with practices of sharing knowledge, information, and data.
Recommended Citation
Michael J. Madison & Ilia Murtazashvili,
The Decentralized Autonomous Corporation as Knowledge Commons,
Governing Corporate Knowledge Commons
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.pitt.edu/fac_book-chapters/58
Included in
Business Organizations Law Commons, Computer Law Commons, Databases and Information Systems Commons, Infrastructure Commons, Internet Law Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Management Information Systems Commons, Other Business Commons, Political Economy Commons, Science and Technology Law Commons, Technology and Innovation Commons