Suspense and Surprise – Empirical Applications
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 8, 2023 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM (CST)
- Chair: Emir Kamenica, University of Chicago
Beliefs that Entertain
Abstract
A large fraction of people's time is spent in leisure but fairly little economic research has been devoted to this study. In this paper, we analyze the role of beliefs on player engagement in a popular video game called "League of Legends". Using a data set of nearly 2.8 million matches representing 28 million players subsequent game engagements, we estimate the effect of lagging behind the opponent, suspense and surprise, and a proxy for flow. We find that, consistent with reference-dependence and loss aversion but contrary to some models of anticipatory utility, lagging behind the opponent increases engagement and the effect is bigger for losers than for winners. Suspense increases engagement but surprise reduces engagement. We also find evidence in favor of flow theory: players engage more when they face a challenge but not when it is too hard or too easy. We find heterogeneity for these effects as a function of skill and competitiveness. We then conduct a non-parametric structural analysis to find the optimal information-revelation process. Using an evolutionary algorithm to search through the game-design space we find that the optimal game pacing can have large improvements on player engagement on the order of "everyone can be made to feel like a winner". Our approach can be used to inform game design.Do Suspense and Surprise Drive Entertainment Demand? Evidence from Twitch.tv
Abstract
We quantify the relative importance of beliefs-based suspense and surprise measures in the entertainment preferences of viewers of Twitch.tv, the largest online video game streaming platform. Using detailed viewership and game statistics data from broadcasts of tournaments of a popular video game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), we compute measures of suspense and surprise for a rational viewer. We then develop and estimate a stylized utility model that underlies viewers' decisions to both join and leave a game stream. Our method allows us to causally identify the direct effect of suspense and surprise on viewers' utilities, separating it from other sources of entertainment value (e.g. team skill) and from indirect/supply-side effects (e.g. word of mouth or advertising). We show that suspense enters a viewer's utility, but find little evidence of the effect of surprise. The magnitudes imply that a one standard deviation increase in round-level suspense decreases the probability of leaving a stream by 0.27 percentage points. We find no detectable effect of suspense and surprise on the decision to join a stream, ruling out indirect effects. Variation in suspense levels explains 9.2% of the observed range of the evolution of a stream's viewership. We use these estimates to evaluate counterfactual game and platform designs. We show that historical updates to CS:GO game rules have increased tournament viewership by 4.1%, that rules can be further modified to increase viewership, and that alternative platform designs that inform joining users of games' scores will additionally increase overall viewership by 1.3%. Together, these results illustrate the value of our method as a general tool that content producers and platforms can use to evaluate and design media products.Entertainment Demand from Expectations
Abstract
This paper uses revealed preference methods to estimate demand for non-instrumental information in entertainment. We apply and extend the theory presented in Ely, Frankel, and Kamenica (2015) to conduct an empirical analysis that examines the effect of suspense and surprise on consumer demand. We first introduce alternative definitions of suspense and surprise using the theory of mutual information, and prove that suspense is in fact expected surprise. We then estimate the impact of suspense and surprise on television viewership using play-by-play and high-temporal frequency television ratings data from the National Basketball Association (NBA). Our primary results suggest that a one standard deviation increase in suspense increases viewership by 2.53% - 2.91%, while surprise has no impact. We also estimate within-game impacts of (i) absolute score differential and (ii) absolute score differential with respect to the point spread on viewership. These findings have important implications for entertainment media companies, including leagues and television broadcasters, and advertisers.Discussant(s)
Geoffrey Fisher
,
Cornell University
Alex Frankel
,
University of Chicago
Ashvin Gandhi
,
University of California-Los Angeles
Brad Humphreys
,
West Virginia University
JEL Classifications
- D9 - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics
- D8 - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty