The Economics of Surprise, Drama and Fiction Convention
Résumé
This paper proposes an economic account of literary and dramatic creation, and bridges the gap between quantitative models of literary works and game theory applications in the humanities, by focusing on outcomes in drama as devices for writers to produce works of optimal interest to their audience. Relying on psychological game theory we can represent the tension between the emotion of surprise and convention in literary work, and obtain certain theoretical optimal patterns. The model predicts that optimal storytelling leads to a departure from realism and convention, as function of preferences for creativity. Across multiple scenes, authors optimally allocate narrative importance to manage the audience’s emotional payoff. We illustrate the framework using a dataset of decisions in a corpus of ancient Greek tragedies.
