Extended Scenario Bundle Analysis: A Formal Framework for Strategic Scenario Modeling
For researchers and practitioners in strategic crisis analysis, this provides a formalized framework that integrates qualitative expert judgment with explicit interdependence and auditable updates, though it is an incremental refinement of existing SBA.
This paper formalizes and extends Scenario Bundle Analysis (SBA) for strategic crisis modeling, introducing a two-layer architecture with a richer attitude vocabulary and precise mathematical definitions to support computational implementation.
Strategic crisis analysis needs representations that combine qualitative expert judgement, explicit interdependence, and auditable update rules without requiring fully specified payoffs or probabilities. Scenario Bundle Analysis (SBA), developed by Amos Perlmutter and Reinhard Selten, provides such a starting point, but the original formulation leaves several database, topology, and update interfaces implicit. This paper presents a formal refinement and extension of the original SBA framework, introducing a two-layer architecture that separates a static scenario database from a dynamic scenario tree system. The extended framework incorporates a richer attitude vocabulary: beliefs, desires, intentions, fears, and coalitional commitments, with expectations treated as doxastic attitudes. It also adds a domain/modifier layer for contextual framing, a topology on admissible scenario spaces\index{Scenario space}, typed assessment-state updates, and multi-criteria evaluation. Mathematical definitions are stated with sufficient precision to support computational implementation.