Friendship paradox¶
A network phenomenon where the average degree of a randomly selected node's neighbors exceeds the average degree of randomly selected nodes themselves. Equivalently, your friends (on average) have more friends than you do. This property arises in any power-law or right-skewed degree distribution. The friendship paradox has applications in epidemiology (disease spread), information diffusion, and misinformation monitoring—high-degree nodes ("sensors") observe novel information earlier than random samples.