Background & Research Focus

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) enable a decentralized trustless organizational structure by using smart contracts.
This thesis examines the key indicators making people move from traditional organizations towards DAOs.
By theoretically defining and empirically proving main differences between DAOs and traditional organizations, the thesis focuses on the lack of hierarchy in DAOs and its impact on the agency theory and transformational vs. transactional theory.
For the empirical research, a quantitative online survey is created which generated a data set of 128 responses.
The results show that DAOs disrupt traditional organizations by (a) being more attractive to people suffering more under the principal-agent problem, (b) being attractive to people with more willingness to shape their own organization, (c) being attractive to people who want to perform best and get rewarded best, and (d) being less attractive to people with high social skill and the willingness to use it in their career.

Chair of Strategy and Organization TUM School of Management Technical University of Munich-3.png

Author: Renzhi Liu

Supervised by: Christian Ziegler, M.Sc.