Scenario analysis
Valuing under several internally consistent pictures of the future as a whole, rather than shifting a single parameter.
How to read the number
Differs from sensitivity analysis in that the assumptions inside one scenario do not contradict each other.
When the metric lies
Scenarios are almost always built around the base case, so the extremes come out symmetric. Reality is distributed otherwise: the bad outcome is often worse than the pessimistic scenario assumes.
Also known as: scenarios