Network Weirdness: Exploring the Origins of Network Paradoxes

Social networks have many counter-intuitive properties, including the "friendship paradox" that states, on average, your friends have more friends than you do. Recently, a variety of other paradoxes were demonstrated in online social networks. This paper explores the origins of these network paradoxes. Specifically, we ask whether they arise from mathematical properties of the networks or whether they have a behavioral origin. We show that sampling from heavy-tailed distributions always gives rise to a paradox in the mean, but not the median. We propose a strong form of network paradoxes, based on utilizing the median, and validate it empirically using data from two online social networks. Specifically, we show that for any user the majority of user's friends and followers have more friends, followers, etc. than the user, and that this cannot be explained by statistical properties of sampling. Next, we explore the behavioral origins of the paradoxes by using the shuffle test to remove correlations between node degrees and attributes. We find that paradoxes for the mean persist in the shuffled network, but not for the median. We demonstrate that strong paradoxes arise due to the assortativity of user attributes, including degree, and correlation between degree and attribute.Comment: Accepted to ICWSM 201

ECONOMICS, PSYCHOLOGY AND HAPPINESS: VIRTUE THEORY VS. SLAVERY OF THE PASSIONS

The truth of any economic theory ultimately hinges on the truth of its philosophy of man. In this essay I will analyze modern economic thought from two perspectives: firstly, from its criticism and development by experimental psychology; secondly, from the philosophical anthropology and Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. I will argue that although there is much truth in modern economics, its philosophical underpinnings are flawed in important aspects, and this accounts for its inability to explain and understand human behavior in some significant respects. I will try to pinpoint the essential character of the philosophical error, and argue for a better philosophy of the person that can provide a starting point for building a new economics.Economics and psychology, happiness, virtue theory

Social Networks across Spatial Agglomerations: the Paradox of High-Tech Clusters. A Critical Revision of Clusters

This paper analyzes a fundamental gap research in high-tech clusters surveying literature in a critical perspective: the paper evidenced the taken-for-granted assumption that knowledge spillovers (KS) are unique assets conveying flows of knowledge in clusters, arguing the importance of traded interactions based on market transaction conditions which occur in clusters, even beyond spatial social networks. In the case of high-tech clusters: which is the type of interactions occurring in clusters when there is a manifested lack of local social networks? Results suggest that under analytical (versus synthetic) knowledge base in clusters, the formal and traded commercial partnerships are also interactions (assets) available in clusters, beyond the traditionally claimed un-traded KS and not being restricted to spatial conditions but to global circuits of knowledge which complement the lack of local resources in high-tech clusters. High-tech clusters surveyed do not show the high levels of inter-firm collaboration that cluster theory predicts