Post-Decentralization E; Post-Mechanism Design: Cognitive Constitution and Meta-Rule Engineering for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

The governance practice of decentralized autonomous organizations faces a deepparadox: token-voting mechanisms designed with the intention of decentralizationpersistently tilt toward centralization and oligarchy during operation. This paperreveals that the root of this predicament lies not only in the design of specificvoting rules but, more fundamentally, in an implicit presupposition of the theoretical paradigm that dominates such rule design—that the governance space hasbeen fully specified before operation begins. The revelation principle on whichtraditional mechanism design theory relies requires the designer to possess a prioriknowledge of the participants’ type space, yet when the very concepts of governance—such as “fairness,” “contribution,” or “membership”—themselves become objectsof dispute and reconstruction, the presupposition of a fixed type space ceases tohold. Drawing on Ostrom’s core insight concerning meta-rules within multi-levelinstitutional analysis, this paper distinguishes the governance levels of distributedautonomous organizations into operational rules, collective-choice rules, and metarules, and proposes a post-mechanism design paradigm centered on a cognitiveconstitution—shifting the designer’s role from “selector of optimal rules” to “steward of the rule-evolution ecosystem.” The paper further advances three meta-ruleprinciples of post-mechanism design: conceptual anchoring, cognitive diversity regularization, and pathological pruning, and discusses the engineering pathways fortranslating these principles into executable technical specifications. The paper argues that when “what constitutes optimal governance” is itself an open question,the core duty of the designer is not to answer this question but to ensure that thesystem possesses the capacity to continuously discover better answers.