TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Charness, Gary
AU  - Feri, Francesco
AU  - Jackson, Matthew
AU  - Melendez-Jimenez, Miguel
AU  - Sutter, Matthias
        TI  - The Friendship Paradox: Causal Evidence of Its Behavioral Consequences
        PY  - 2026/Aug/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 18861
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp18861
        AB  - 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.
        KW  - friendship paradox
KW  - networks
KW  - learning
KW  - experiment
        ER  -