The Bounded Deliberation-Decision Feasibility Theory (BDDFT)

This paper proposes the Bounded Deliberation-Decision Feasibility Theory (BDDFT), a two-branch research framework designed to investigate how analytical refinement, information acquisition, resource expenditure, and delay interact with the availability of a usable decision under a finite deadline, focusing primarily on the Analytical Refinement-Decision Availability Paradox (ARDAP). Branch I, the Analytical Refinement-Decision Depletion Model (ARDDM), describes conditions where additional analysis can improve a decision's estimated quality while raising the probability of missing its operational deadline, whereas Branch II, the Bounded Deliberation-Adaptive Decision Regulation Model (BDADRM), outlines candidate control policies for deciding whether to continue analysis, acquire information, stop, escalate, or invoke a fallback action. The framework keeps decision quality, epistemic uncertainty, risk, resource expenditure, delay loss, and decision availability distinct, establishing a state representation, a constrained objective, an operational divergence indicator, an optimal-stopping formulation, twelve analytical layers, and eight core domains for interdisciplinary investigation. Emphasizing a conditional research claim, the work provides a formal research program, falsifiable hypotheses, baseline comparisons, boundary conditions, and reproducibility requirements without treating unperformed experiments as evidence.