The very first day of 2024 begins with a lovely paper that I stumbled upon, like, two days ago? I was reading a survey about information design (Kamenica 2019), when this featured paper captivated me on first sight. Well, sometimes, the academic stars just align!
Suspense and Surprise
By Jeffrey Ely, Alexander Framkel and Emir Kamenica
ABSTRACT
We model demand for noninstrumental information, drawing on the idea that people derive entertainment utility from suspense and surprise. A period has more suspense if the variance of the next period’s beliefs is greater. A period has more surprise if the current belief is further from the last period’s belief. Under these definitions, we analyze the optimal way to reveal information over time so as to maximize expected suspense or surprise experienced by a Bayesian audience. We apply our results to the design of mystery novels, political primaries, casinos, game shows, auctions, and sports.
I recognize some-thing when I see one. Haven’t read it all (well, gotta save the sweets for tmrw), but the flow of idea has already stroked me, that I’ll even have to force myself to stop otherwise I simply would be too excited to sleep tonight. Huh, suspense.
Stay tuned for tmrw, as I’ll figure out and write about its math. Spolier alert, the paper measured information’s non-instrumental utility, w.r.t. surprise or suspense - like Euclidean distance between informational distributions (surprise) and informational variance over the next period w.r.t. the belief now (suspense).