In our books, there are just four who would be the prime minister post-elections.

On the BN side, they are caretaker prime minister and Umno chief Najib Abdul Razak and his deputy on both counts, Muhyiddin Yassin.

On the Pakatan Rakyat side, we pick Anwar Ibrahim ( right ) of PKR with an outside possibility of PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang being chosen as prime minister, mainly in the event of Anwar not being able to take the position for any reason.

There are different scenarios under which each of them can become prime minister.

What we have done to make the system a bit more analytical is to use a probability tree, a method which is used in decision-making in business and scenario analysis.

For this, we start with an event - the general election. And then we assign probabilities to the outcome.

In our base-case scenario (based on a limited survey among our staff) we have assigned a probability of 0.6 or a 60 percent chance that BN will win the general election (see chart) .

By implication, and since there are only two coalitions which have a chance of winning the elections, Pakatan will have (1-0.6 = 0.4)  or 40 percent chance of winning the election.

We move on then to the next node, in the event of a BN victory.

BN can win either by a higher majority or lower majority than the last time.

Again relying on our own limited survey, we think the chances of it winning by a larger majority are rather slim and have assigned a 0.2 or 20 percent chance to that outcome and therefore a 0.8 probability or 80 percent chance that it will have a lower majority of seats.

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