Online Supplementary Appendix - What Makes a Market Free? Governance Stability, Contestability and Institutional Order

Data for Market freedom is not the absence of governance. Its governance component has three institutional conditions: participants can know the rules before entry (legibility), affected parties can obtain effective correction (corrigibility), and entry stays open to otherwise qualified outsiders (openness). These are necessary, not sufficient, and they separate free exchange orders from insider-protective ones like cartels. Across four DeFi governance spaces — every closed single-choice or basic ballot with at least ten voters, 1,455 of 2,498 proposals — one named address leads sixty-nine percent of a space's ballots, gates its agenda, and sits on its admin multisig. Keywords: market freedom; governance quality; contestability; rule of law; political epistemology; DeFi governance; cartels; Hayek; Ostrom; Gowder JEL codes: B52; D02; D47; K20; L51.