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We develop and apply epistemic tests to various decentralized governance methods as well as to study the impact of participation. These tests probe the ability to reach a correct outcome when there is one. We find that partial abstention is a strong governance method from an epistemic standpoint compared to alternatives such as various forms of ``transfer delegation\" in which voters explicitly transfer some or all of their voting rights to others. We make a stronger case for multi-step transfer delegation than is present in previous work but also demonstrate that transfer delegation has inherent epistemic weaknesses. We show that enhanced direct participation, voters exercising their own voting rights, can have a variety of epistemic impacts, some very negative. We identify governance conditions under which additional direct participation is guaranteed to do no epistemic harm and is likely to increase the probability of making correct decisions. In light of the epistemic challenges of voting-based decentralized governance, we consider the possible supplementary use of prediction markets, auctions, and AI agents to improve outcomes. All these results are significant because epistemic performance matters if entities such as DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) wish to compete with organizations that are more centralized.

In this article, we propose a new form of DAO governance that uses a sequential auction mechanism to overcome entrenched control issues that have emerged for DAOs by creating a regime of temporary contestable control. The mechanism avoids potential public choice problems inherent in voting approaches but at the same time provides a vehicle that can enhance and secure value that inheres to DAO voting and other DAO non-market governance procedures. It is robust to empty voting and is code feasible. It not only facilitates the ability of DAOs to meet their normative and operational goals in the face of diverse regulatory approaches, but also strengthens the case for creating a less burdensome but at least equally effective regulatory regime for DAOs that employ the mechanism. Designed to shift control to the party with the most promising business plan, at the same time it deters value destruction by control parties, maximizes social surplus, and distributes that surplus in a way that tends to promote investment by other parties both at start up and on an on-going basis.

In this article, we propose a new form of DAO governance that uses a sequential auction mechanism to overcome entrenched control issues that have emerged for DAOs by creating a regime of temporary contestable control. The mechanism avoids potential public choice problems inherent in voting approaches but at the same time provides a vehicle that can enhance and secure value that inheres to DAO voting and other DAO non-market governance procedures. It is robust to empty voting and is code feasible. It facilitates the ability of DAOs to meet their normative and operational goals in the face of diverse regulatory approaches. Designed to shift control to the party with the most promising business plan, at the same time it distributes surplus in a way that tends to promote investment by other parties.

Bayesian empirical approaches appear frequently in fields such as engineering, computer science, political science and medicine, but almost never in law. This article illustrates how such approaches might be very useful in empirical legal studies. In particular, Bayesian approaches enable a much more natural connection between the normative or positive issues that typically motivate such studies and the empirical results.

This thesis examines the hypothesis that among other, possibly coincident, archetypal or developmental meanings, the traditional story of Adam and Eve strongly reflects multiple and conflicting major conceptions of infant psychological development, including prominent ones arising from depth psychological approaches that do not include a strong role for myth. A core element of this examination is a single in-depth illustration: The story of Adam and Eve closely tracks not only the central conceptions of Melanie Klein’s narrative of infancy but also many of the details. Several examples in the literature are described in which other infancy narratives are linked to the story, some of which relate to the Klein parallel, and the concluding section lists and briefly discusses possible major examples not yet developed in the literature as avenues for future research. The last two chapters discuss some implications of the hypothesis, if true, for therapy, culture, and religion.

A recent wave of innovation in the financial markets has raised difficult tax policy questions. Professor Strnad describes several frameworks for designing tax rules for new financial products and shows that two types of existing approaches, bifurcation and integration, can create tax systems that are universal, meaning that the system assigns a tax treatment to every transaction, and consistent, meaning that changing the form of the transaction will not affect that treatment. In particular, Professor Strnad shows that the spanning method, a particular bifurcation approach, can create a consistent and universal tax system if the system is also linear. Constraints created by the current tax system's treatment of certain types of assets, however, prevent the spanning method from providing a practical solution to the problems posed by the taxation of new financial products. Professor Strnad also shows that integration schemes can provide universal and consistent tax systems, even if those systems are nonlinear. Still, discontinuities in the current tax law limit the ability of integration schemes to solve all of the problems created by financial innovation. As a result, Professor Strnad concludes that, in the absence of a major congressional overhaul of the tax laws, policymakers should prescribe tax rules for new financial products on a case by case basis.

Much of the modern tax policy debate has centered on 2 paradigmatic tax treatments: cash flow taxation and accretion taxation. Cash flow taxation calls for deducting investment costs when they are paid and taking cash receipts into income when they are received. Accretion taxation calls for taxing changes in the value of the investment even if the investor is simply holding the investment and neither paying out nor receiving any cash flows. One set of implementation problems is particularly serious for accretion taxation: how to tax unrealized changes in wealth. Policymakers must address the question of periodicity, i.e., how often changes in value should be assessed and taxed. Scholars have tended to focus on the length of the assessment period rather than on the riskiness of assets and on whether or not taxpayers may trade the assets strategically to accelerate tax losses. Being able to specify normative costs would provide assurance that the solutions arrived at for the easy cases are, in fact, good solutions.

During the past 25 years, the US tax authorities have made a major effort to bring the income taxation of bonds closer to the accretion tax model. A major focus of this activity has been the treatment of bonds issued at a discount. The Internal Revenue Code refers to the difference between the redemption price and the issuance price as the amount of original issue discount (OID) for the bond. Discount bonds present 2 problems. First, when an investor buys a discount bond and holds it until maturity, the gain that corresponds to the gradual accrual of OID will not be realized or taxed until the redemption price is paid. A 2nd problem is the treatment of market discount bonds. These bonds are not issued at a discount but fall in value and then are purchased at a price that is less than the redemption price. One obvious reform of the current system would be to treat market discount in exactly the same ways as OID.

Ed McCaffery’s central goal in his chapter is to attack the use of behavioral insights “to support proposals to promote individual savings through ad hoc, tax-favored vehicles” (hereinafter, AHTFVs). The main arguments are that AHTFVs are extraneous or counterproductive for rational “life-cycle hypothesis” savers under the current system, AHTFVs do not help individuals who undersave because they are myopic, and a better approach would be to adopt a consistent postpaid (cash-flow) consumption tax (hereinafter, CFCT) with no estate tax...