IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-05533963.html

The Economics of Surprise, Drama and Fiction Convention

Author

Listed:
  • Laurent Gauthier

    (CAC-IXXI, Complex Systems Institute, ESPRI - Espace, Pratiques sociales et Images dans les mondes Grec et Romain - ArScAn - Archéologies et Sciences de l'Antiquité - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - UP8 - Université Paris 8 - UPN - Université Paris Nanterre - MCC - Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Laurent Gauthier, 2026. "The Economics of Surprise, Drama and Fiction Convention," Post-Print hal-05533963, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05533963
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05533963. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.