Article Dans Une Revue Journal of Cultural Economics Année : 2026

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.

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Dates et versions

hal-05533963 , version 1 (03-03-2026)

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Laurent Gauthier. The Economics of Surprise, Drama and Fiction Convention. Journal of Cultural Economics, 2026, ⟨10.1007/s10824-026-09589-x⟩. ⟨hal-05533963⟩
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