Multi-Issue Actor Analysis: Tools and Models for Assessing Technology Environments

In strategic prospective, scenario thinking and negotiation processes, analysis of the actor game plays an important role. Such an analysis endeavours to rank the positions of stakeholders on many strategic issues, to assess potential convergences and divergences, and to anticipate coalitions and conflicts. Many models and tools that have been proposed and used for these purposes rest on matrix analysis, game theory and simulation. The present paper examines two of them: Mactor, a model of scenario planning, and a negotiation model derived from a political decision model based on game theory. This paper detects the flaws, similarities and differences of these approaches. Based on this comparison, a new model is proposed, with the advantages of both, but without their detected flaws. The model has been applied to an assessment of the public WLAN landscape. The paper sketches the first results which now should be integrated into a more sophisticated scenario analysis.