# kaal:claim:3782203-031

**Claim.** Charging admission to a DAO disincentivizes defection because the sunk cost of joining makes cheating expensive when rejoining would require paying again, a mechanism the authors identify as costly signaling that works better the more cheaters the surrounding environment contains.

**Type.** mechanism  **Support.** argued

**Holds when.**

- anonymous membership
- environments with many bad actors

**Source quote.**

> First, we can disincentivize defection/betrayal by charging admission to the DAO. With the sunk cost of joining, it is more expensive to cheat, since then it would be expensive to rejoin even if members could be anonymous. This is described as costly signaling.

**From.** Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, *A Technical Perspective on Decentralization* (2021), Application to reputation tokens, page 20

**Cite as.** Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, A Technical Perspective on Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782203

**Verify.** sha256 of source PDF `ab8a22d0dbb026a09212a4c85963f3c05787cf80775e8613ae3724e3883e7a56` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/Academic-Papers/main/papers/pdf/Calcaterra%20and%20Kaal%20-%202021%20-%20A%20Technical%20Perspective%20on%20Decentralization.pdf

**Topics.** consensus-and-security, dao

**Keywords.** costly-signaling, admission-fees, sybil-resistance, dao-design, denial-of-service

**Related claims.**

- restated_by: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3981021-032

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the claim. Its sha256 is the content hash used for attestation.