Ideas Made to Matter
Report details COVID-19’s impact on the digital economy
MIT research about the pandemic looks at economic fallout, the impact of government interventions, digital technology, and fighting misinformation.
Apr 1, 2021
Faculty
Dean Eckles
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Dean Eckles is the Mitsubishi Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan. He is affiliate faculty at the Institute for Data, Systems & Society in the Schwarzman College of Computing.
His substantive research examines people's interactions with and through communication technologies, especially the ways these technologies mediate, amplify, and direct social influence. This work sometimes requires or benefits from new analytical methods, so Eckles also works on applied statistics, design of field experiments, and causal inference.
Prior to joining MIT, he was a scientist at Facebook, where he worked on many product areas and analytical methods, including News Feed, messaging, advertising, tools for randomized experiments, and survey methods. Eckles previously worked in research at Nokia and Yahoo.
Eckles received his BA in philosophy, a BS and MS in cognitive science, an MS in statistics, and a PhD in communication, all from Stanford University.
Honors
Eckles wins Amazon Research Award
Publications
Featured Publication
"Bias and High-Dimensional Adjustment in Observational Studies of Peer Effects."
Eckles, Dean, and Eytan Bakshy. Journal of the American Statistical Association Vol. 116, No. 534 (2021): 507-517. Supplemental Materials. arXiv Preprint.
Featured Publication
"Estimating Peer Effects in Networks with Peer Encouragement Designs."
Eckles, Dean, René F. Kizilcec, and Eytan Bakshy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 113, No. 27 (2016): 7316-7322.
"Asymmetric Social Influence from Personalized Social Cues."
Sean J. Taylor, Eytan Bakshy, Dean Eckles and Sinan K. Aral. In Proceedings of the INFORMS Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA: November 2014.
"Auditory Priming for Upcoming Events."
Timothy Sohn, Leila Takayama, Dean Eckles and Rafael Ballagas. In CHI '09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, edited by Scott Hudson. New York, NY: April 2009.
"Bootstrap Thompson Sampling and Sequential Decision Problems in the Behavioral Sciences."
Eckles, Dean, and Maurits Kaptein. Sage Open Vol. 9, No. 2 (2019): 1-12. Download Paper.
"Bootstrapping Data Arrays of Arbitrary Order."
Owen, Art B. and Dean Eckles. The Annals of Applied Statistics Vol. 6, No. 3 (2012): 895-927.
Recent Insights
Ideas Made to Matter
Study: Emphasizing vaccine acceptance could boost immunization rates
Public messaging emphasizing that others are getting a COVID-19 vaccine is one effective way to overcome vaccine hesitancy, according to a new study.
Mar 8, 2021
Media Highlights
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National Cyber Security News Today
4 ideas for understanding and managing the power of algorithms on social...
Associate Prof. Dean Eckles moderated the "Algorithmic Transparency” session at the Social Media Summit at MIT.
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TechRepublic
4 ideas for understanding and managing the power of algorithms on social...
At The Social Media Summit, conversations ranged from the war in Ukraine and disinformation to transparency in algorithms and responsible AI.
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The Week (India)
Study shows how pro-BJP toolkits get hashtags trending on Twitter
[Prof.] Dean Eckles [and co-authors] said their study provided the first systematic analysis of cross-platform campaigns.
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The Washington Post
A group of moms on Facebook built an island of good-faith vaccine debate...
... research supports the idea that social media can be a force for pro-vaccine persuasion, under the right circumstances.