Friendship Paradox and Attention Economics

Abstract

The friendship paradox is revisited by considering both local and global averages of friends. How the economics of attention affects the recruitment of friends is examined. Statistical implications of varying individual attentions are investigated and it is argued that this is one reason why the mean of friends is higher than the median in social networks. The distribution of friends skews to the right for two other reasons: (i) the presence of institutional nodes that increase the mean; and (ii) the dormancy of many of the nodes. The difference between friends and friends of friends is a measure of the structural information about the network.