Very important. As I'm sure you're aware this was one of the reasons for squared vote curves.

From the whitepaper, this is known as the Prisoners Dilemma:

> The naive voting process creates a Prisoner’s Dilemma whereby each individual voter has incentive to vote for themselves at the expense of the larger community goal. If every voter defects by voting for themselves then no currency will end up distributed and the currency as a whole will fail to gain network effect. On the other hand, if only one voter defects then that voter would win undeserved profits while having minimal effect on the overall value of the currency.

> **In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner.** For example a quadratic function in votes, i.e., someone with twice the votes of someone else should receive four times the payout and someone with three times the votes should receive nine times the payout. In other words, the reward is proportional to votes^2 rather than votes. This mirrors the value of network effect which grows with n^2 the number of participants, according to Metcalfe’s Law.

> Assuming all users have equal stake, someone who only receives their own vote will receive much less than someone who receives votes from 100 different users. This encourages users to cooperate to vote for the same things to maximize the payout. This system also creates financial incentive to collude where everyone votes on one thing and then divides the reward equally among themselves.