Owning 30% of a company usually gives you just as much voting power as if you owned the whole thing.
SSRN · March 17, 2026 · 6300182
The Takeaway
Most corporate laws assume influence scales linearly with the number of shares you own. By calculating 'pivotality'—how often a specific shareholder's vote actually determines the outcome—this research shows that ownership concentration among others can make a minority holder the absolute decider of every corporate decision.
From the abstract
This paper provides a quantitative analysis of shareholder voting power in U.S. public companies. I measure voting power as a shareholder's pivotality in all possible coalitions, isolating structural influence derived from share ownership while abstracting from realized voting behavior and proposal selection. Because exact pivotality calculations are tractable only for a limited number of shareholders, I develop a hybrid method that combines precise enumeration for the largest holders with appro