Related papers: The Friendship Paradox and Systematic Biases in Pe…
Our friends have more friends than we do. That is the basis of the friendship paradox. In mathematical terms, the mean number of friends of friends is higher than the mean number of friends. In the present study, we analyzed the…
We revisit the classical friendship paradox which states that on an average ones friends have at least as many friends as oneself and generalize it to a variety of network centrality indices. For a broad class of spectral centralities on…
We consider SIS contagion processes over networks where, a classical assumption is that individuals' decisions to adopt a contagion are based on their immediate neighbors. However, recent literature shows that some attributes are more…
Friendship prediction is an important task in social network analysis (SNA). It can help users identify friends and improve their level of activity. Most previous approaches predict users' friendship based on their historical records, such…
Research on friendship networks in schools suggests that heterogeneity increases homophily preferences. We argue that this may be a misleading interpretation of the coefficients of the exponential random graph models (p*) that are used to…
Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a…
In empirical studies of friendship networks participants are typically asked, in interviews or questionnaires, to identify some or all of their close friends, resulting in a directed network in which friendships can, and often do, run in…
Humans learn about the world, and how to act in the world, in many ways: from individually conducting experiments to observing and reproducing others' behavior. Different learning strategies come with different costs and likelihoods of…
We show that in an undirected graph under degree biased sampling the expected degree of vertices is equal to the expected degree of their neighbors. In consequence, under the biased sampling the social network result known as the friendship…
Addiction to internet-based social media has increasingly emerged as a critical social problem, especially among young adults and teenagers. Based on multiple research studies, excessive usage of social media may have detrimental…
We explore a paradox of collective action and certainty in science wherein the more scientists research together, the less that work contributes to the value of their collective certainty. When scientists address similar problems and share…
The Matthew effect describes the phenomenon that in societies the rich tend to get richer and the potent even more powerful. It is closely related to the concept of preferential attachment in network science, where the more connected nodes…
It is very common to observe crowds of individuals solving similar problems with similar information in a largely independent manner. We argue here that crowds can become "smarter," i.e., more efficient and robust, by partially following…
Peer effects, in which the behavior of an individual is affected by the behavior of their peers, are posited by multiple theories in the social sciences. Other processes can also produce behaviors that are correlated in networks and groups,…
Dynamic models and statistical inference for the diffusion of information in social networks is an area which has witnessed remarkable progress in the last decade due to the proliferation of social networks. Modeling and inference of…
We study mixing patterns in networks, meaning the propensity for nodes of different kinds to connect to one another. The phenomenon of assortative mixing, whereby nodes prefer to connect to others that are similar to themselves, has been…
We consider the problem of estimating social influence, the effect that a person's behavior has on the future behavior of their peers. The key challenge is that shared behavior between friends could be equally explained by influence or by…
The paradoxical aspect of integration of a social group has been highlighted by Peter Blau (Exchange and Power in Social Life, Wiley and Sons, 1964). During the integration process, the group members simultaneously compete for social status…
Our network of acquaintances determines how we get exposed to ideas, products, or cultural artworks (books, music, movies, etc.). Though this principle is part of our common sense, little is known about the specific pathways through which…
This paper deals with randomized polling of a social network. In the case of forecasting the outcome of an election between two candidates A and B, classical intent polling asks randomly sampled individuals: who will you vote for?…