I have always been fascinated by the subject of rationality. Do people make rational life decisions? Do people make rational money and investing decisions? Do people make rational voting decisions even?

The traditional assumption of rationality is that people will want to maximise their utility. It baffles me why people would readily admit that the PAP is the better party and yet vote opposition. By doing so, are they not maximising utility?

It bothered me so much that I decided to do some reading up. I found my answer in behavioral economist Richard Thaler’s theory on two forms of utility. On top of the regular form of economic utility we are so familiar with, he proposes another form called the transaction utility. This in essence means how good we perceive a deal to be.

I wrote an article to suggest some reasons why voting for the PAP would result in ...