Generalized Friendship Paradox: An Analytical Approach

Abstract. The friendship paradox refers to the sociological observation that, while the people’s assessment of their own popularity is typically self-aggrandizing, in reality they are less popular than their friends. The generalized friendship paradox is the average alter superiority observed empirically in social settings, scientific collaboration networks, as well as online social media. We posit a quality-based network growth model in which the chance for a node to receive new links depends both on its de-gree and a quality parameter. Nodes are assigned qualities the first time they join the network, and these do not change over time. We analyse the model theoretically, finding expressions for the joint degree-quality distri-bution and nearest-neighbor distribution. We then demonstrate that this model exhibits both the friendship paradox and the generalized friend-ship paradox at the network level, regardless of the distribution of qual-ities. We also show that, in the proposed model, the degree and quality of each node are positively correlated regardless of how node qualities are distributed.