To be thrilling, you must occasionally be boring.

This is one of several lessons that came out of our recent study of drama-based entertainment using the tools of information economics — the results of which were published in the Journal of Political Economy in February. When we recognize that the capacity to surprise an audience is a scarce resource (“You can’t fool all of the people all of the time”), it becomes natural to use economic theory to optimize that resource.

We began our analysis by noticing a certain similarity. In a number of settings — watching basketball games, reading mystery novels, gambling in a casino — people are invested in learning the outcome (which team will win, who is the murderer, will I walk out flush or broke), but they do not wish to learn the outcome too quickly. In all of these settings, a key aspect of entertainment is the revelation of information over time.

Information revealed over time generates drama in two ways: suspense and surprise. Suspense is experienced before the fact, when something informative is about to happen. Think about a baseball scenario: bases loaded, full count, two men out. We say that a moment has a lot of suspense if there is a lot of uncertainty about what you will soon think about the outcome.

Surprise, on the other hand, is experienced after the fact. We are surprised if something unexpected has just happened. Think about a soccer goalie scoring from a goal kick. We say that a moment has a lot of surprise if your belief about the outcome is very different from what you thought a moment ago.

Once these concepts are formalized in this way, the question of how to maximize entertainment — that is, how to generate the most suspense or the most surprise — becomes a mathematical problem that can be tackled on a whiteboard. The solution yields some simple insights (for example, remember occasionally to be boring) but also many nuanced ones.