The Friendship Paradox: Causal Evidence of Its Behavioral Consequences

Gary Charness, Francesco Feri, Matthew Jackson, Miguel Melendez-Jimenez and Matthias Sutter

No 12905, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We provide a first causal analysis of the behavioral consequences of the friendship paradox—the fact that people’s friends in a network have more connections than average. We find that people’s behavior is biased by their network position: they do not best respond to what they should infer the average behavior of the population to be, but instead simply to the average behavior of their friends. Moreover, we find that they fail to learn to overcome such a bias when relocated within the network, varying their observational environment. In these games of complements, the friendship paradox generates a systematic upward distortion in actions, increases behavioral dispersion, and persists despite learning opportunities.

Keywords: friendship paradox; networks; learning; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D01 D85 D90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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