The happiness paradox: your friends are happier than you

Most individuals in social networks experience a so-called Friendship Paradox: they are less popular than their friends on average. This effect may explain recent findings that widespread social network media use leads to reduced happiness. However the relation between popularity and happiness is poorly understood. A Friendship paradox does not necessarily imply a Happiness paradox where most individuals are less happy than their friends. Here we report the first direct observation of a significant Happiness Paradox in a large-scale online social network of $39,110$ Twitter users. Our results reveal that popular individuals are indeed happier and that a majority of individuals experience a significant Happiness paradox. The magnitude of the latter effect is shaped by complex interactions between individual popularity, happiness, and the fact that users cluster assortatively by level of happiness. Our results indicate that the topology of online social networks and the distribution of happiness in some populations can cause widespread psycho-social effects that affect the well-being of billions of individuals.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, 2 table

Measuring the Generalized Friendship Paradox in Networks with Quality-dependent Connectivity

The friendship paradox is a sociological phenomenon stating that most people have fewer friends than their friends do. The generalized friendship paradox refers to the same observation for attributes other than degree, and it has been observed in Twitter and scientific collaboration networks. This paper takes an analytical approach to model this phenomenon. We consider a preferential attachment-like network growth mechanism governed by both node degrees and `qualities'. We introduce measures to quantify paradoxes, and contrast the results obtained in our model to those obtained for an uncorrelated network, where the degrees and qualities of adjacent nodes are uncorrelated. We shed light on the effect of the distribution of node qualities on the friendship paradox. We consider both the mean and the median to measure paradoxes, and compare the results obtained by using these two statistics

Gibson's Paradox and the Gold Standard

This paper provides a new explanation for Gibson's Paradox -- the observation that the price level and the nominal interest rate were positively correlated over long periods of economic history. We explain this phenomenon interms of the fundamental workings of a gold standard. Under a gold standard, the price level is the reciprocal of the real price of gold. Because gold is adurable asset, its relative price is systematically affected by fluctuations inthe real productivity of capital, which also determine real interest rates. Our resolution of the Gibson Paradox seems more satisfactory than previous hypotheses. It explains why the paradox applied to real as well as nominal rates of return, its coincidence with the gold standard period, and the co-movement of interest rates, prices, and the stock of monetary gold during the gold standard period. Empirical evidence using contemporary data on gold prices and real interest rates supports our theory.

When are Agents Negligible?

We examine the following paradox: In a dynamic setting, an arbitrarily large finite number of agents adn a continuum of agents can lead to radically different equilibrium outcomes. We show that in a simple strategic setting this paradox is a general phenomenon. We also show that the paradox disappears when there is noisy observation of the players' actions: The aggregate level of noise must disappear as the number of players increases, but not too rapidly. We give several economic examples in which this paradox has recently received attention: the durable goods monopoly, corporate takeovers, and time consistency of optimal governmetn policy.

Serious Gamification: on the Redesign of a Popular Paradox

We challenge the idea of the paradoxical nature of the concept serious games and ask how researchers and designers need to conceive of serious games so that they at all appear paradoxical. To develop and answer this question, we draw on a theory-method that considers all forms of observation as paradoxical. We then use the tetralemma, a structure from traditional Indian logics, to resolve the paradox of serious games into this larger paradox of observation. Consequently, serious games may only be considered a paradox if we presume realities and define games as deviations therefrom. The increasing gamification of society, however, does not allow realities to be defined in contrast to games anymore. We therefore conclude that serious games do not represent particularly paradoxical forms of games, but rather next levels of reflexivity in communication design and in the self-definitions of next societies