The SDP offer to the WP is totally fair

The By-Election drama just got weird. The SDP offer to the WP of a fielding an SDP candidate and ceding control of the Town Council to the WP struck me as very unusual when I first heard it. Wouldn’t it look like the SDP taking the glamorous position while leaving the WP to do the hard work?

Taking time to reason it out, it turns out that this is an interesting exercise in fair division. Before writing this off as a silly, consider the following common home scenario. Imagine cutting a cake to be shared between two children, and given an allocation to a child, that child always prefers getting a bit more. Now, one half of this cake has more jelly on it, while the other has more fruit. It also turns out that one child likes jelly more and the other likes fruit. So by giving the appropriate half to the appropriate child, each child is happy that he got “more than half” based on his “preferences”.

This proposed division of roles and responsibilities seems to be something along those lines. The SDP believes in serving Singaporeans by advocating policies that benefit Singaporeans in Parliament, and speaking out against flawed PAP policies and PAP abuses. The WP, on the other hand, takes the path of building trust with residents by running an effective Town Council operation with successful local projects. This is not to say that the SDP is poor at local administration and the WP is hopeless at speaking up in Parliament. These are just party proclivities. It also seems that the division of powers is analogous. The SDP values the Parliamentary voice, while the WP values the financial control of the Town Council which enables those local projects than boost their credibility.

Therefore, this offer, weird as it seems at first, does make some sense.

Now, allow me to segway into an algorithm for envy free division between two individuals. In the cake cutting setting, it is individual 1 cuts and individual 2 chooses. So if the powers and responsibilities were cut in the above manner, which would the WP choose? (Suppose, also that perhaps the MP allowance was also split, since some people seem to think that the MP allowance is very important.)

It seems almost certain that the WP would pick Town Council control so it can consolidate its local strength. In fact, that would place it in an even better position in that seat in the next General Elections, especially if it builds a credible policy platform.

We’ll wait and see how this drama unfolds.

Jeremy Chen
*Article first appeared on http://jeremy-chen.org/