Rewarding Informed Voting in PoS Governance

2026-10-06

AI Summary

This study addresses the core challenge in Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) governance of incentivizing delegates to acquire information and vote honestly, noting that existing proportional reward-sharing mechanisms inadequately account for information acquisition costs. Drawing on game theory and mechanism design, this work constructs a PoS voting model incorporating such costs and proposes conditional reward rules as an alternative to traditional proportional sharing. The proposed mechanism renders honest voting a strictly dominant strategy under symmetric positive effort levels, sustaining equilibria with equivalent or higher effort while significantly improving on-chain decision accuracy. These findings offer a robust incentive mechanism design for decentralized governance systems.

Abstract

We study reward design for delegated representatives who acquire costly information and vote on a binary governance proposal. Effort improves both private information and delegated voting weight. We show that no payment rule can make sincere voting strictly optimal at every positive effort profile under a non-neutral prior, while fixed budgets limit accuracy in large symmetric committees. We then compare proportional sharing with a conditional rule that rewards only members of a sufficiently large winning coalition. Unlike proportional sharing, which supports sincere voting only through indifference, the conditional rule makes sincere voting strictly optimal at symmetric positive effort profiles. It supports sincere equilibria with the same effort as proportional sharing and, under suitable reward-cost conditions, with strictly higher effort and decision accuracy. Insincere equilibria may nevertheless coexist.

Problem

• Reward design
• PoS governance
• Delegated voting
• Information acquisition
• Incentive mechanism

Innovation

• PoS Governance
• Reward Design
• Conditional Rule
• Delegated Voting
• Information Acquisition