  There is a class of models for pol/mil/econ bargaining and conflict that is
loosely based on the Median Voter Theorem which has been used with great
success for about 30 years. However, there are fundamental mathematical
limitations to these models. They apply to issues which can be represented on a
single one-dimensional continuum. They represent fundamental group decision
process by a deterministic Condorcet Election: deterministic voting by all
actors, and deterministic outcomes of each vote. This work provides a
methodology for addressing a broader class of problems. The first extension is
to continuous issue sets where the consequences of policies are not
well-described by a distance measure or utility is not monotonic in distance.
The second fundamental extension is to inherently discrete issue sets. Because
the options cannot easily be mapped into a multidimensional space so that the
utility depends on distance, we refer to it as a non-spatial issue set. The
third, but most fundamental, extension is to represent the negotiating process
as a probabilistic Condorcet election (PCE). The actors' generalized voting is
deterministic, but the outcomes of the votes is probabilistic. The PCE provides
the flexibility to make the first two extensions possible; this flexibility
comes at the cost of less precise predictions and more complex validation. The
methodology has been implemented in two proof-of-concept prototypes which
address the subset selection problem of forming a parliament, and strategy
optimization for one-dimensional issues.
