Suspense and Surprise: Online Appendix

Here we describe how the plots in Figure 3 are generated. There are six applications of the suspense and surprise models: tennis, soccer, blackjack, Clinton-Obama primary, optimal surprise, and optimal suspense. For each application, the second column depicts a scatterplot of surprise and suspense values for each observation, where u(x) = √ x and absolute surprise and suspense values are divided by the square root of the number of periods until beliefs first hit 0 or 1. Using the observation closest to the median surprise and suspense values, the first column traces actual and counterfactual belief paths during the periods within the median game. Below we provide an overview of the data and instructions for replicating these plots.