Dean Eckles

Faculty

Dean Eckles

About

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

Aral and Eckles win for a working paper

Eckles wins Amazon Research Award

Publications

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.

Featured Publication

"Bias and High-Dimensional Adjustment in Observational Studies of Peer Effects."

Eckles, Dean and Eytan Bakshy, Working Paper. 2018.

"Targeting for Long-term Outcomes."

Yang, Jeremy, Dean Eckles, Paramveer Dhillon, and Sinan Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6224-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, October 2020.

"Interdependence and the Cost of Uncoordinated Responses to COVID-19."

Holtz, David, Michael Zhao, Seth G. Benzell, Cathy Y. Cao, M. Amin Rahimian, Jeremy Yang, Jennifer Allen, Avinash Collis, Alex Moehring, Tara Sowrirajan, Dipayan Ghosh, Yunhao Zhang, Paramveer S. Dhillon, Christos Nicolaides, Dean Eckles, and Sinan Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6111-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, May 2020.

"Protecting Elections from Social Media Manipulation."

Aral, Sinan K. and Dean Eckles. Science Vol. 365, No. 6456 (2019): 858-861.

"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.

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Recent Insights

Ideas Made to Matter

MIT Sloan research about social media and misinformation

“Fake news” and misinformation peak online during presidential election years. Experts look at how they spread and what can be done to stop them.

Oct 5, 2020
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Ideas Made to Matter

MIT Sloan research about the coronavirus pandemic

The latest working papers from MIT Sloan faculty about the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic.

Apr 23, 2020
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