Dean Eckles

Support Staff

Katie Means

(617) 324-4253
kmeans@mit.edu

About

Academic Groups

Marketing

Academic Area

Management Science

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

Sinan Aral and Dean Eckles have won the 2020 INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) eBusiness Section Best Paper Award. Their winning working paper, “Targeting for Long-Term Outcomes: Evidence from Large-Scale Field Experiments,” was co-authored with Jeremy Yang (their MIT Sloan PhD student) and Paramveer Dhillon (University of Michigan), who is a former MIT Sloan postdoc and research associate.

Eckles wins Amazon Research Award

Dean Eckles has won a 2018 Amazon Research Award, which recognizes and funds outstanding research projects conducted by PhD students or postdocs under the supervision of the faculty member awardee. Research areas considered for the award are computer vision; economics; knowledge management and data quality; machine learning algorithms and theory; natural language processing; online advertising; operations research and optimization; personalization; robotics; search and information retrieval; security, privacy and abuse prevention; and speech. Eckles’s awarded research project is entitled, “Complex modeling and inference with online rating data.” The award winners and projects appear on this Amazon Research Awards page

Publications

Google Scholar

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. Journal of the American Statistical Association. Forthcoming. Supplemental Materials. arXiv Preprint.

"Perverse Consequences of Debunking in a Twitter Field Experiment: Being Corrected for Posting False News Increases Subsequent Sharing of Low Quality, Partisan, and Toxic Content."

Mohsen Mosleh, Cameron Martel, Dean Eckles, and David G. Rand. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, NY: Forthcoming.

"Spillover Effects in Experimental Data."

Aronow, Peter M., Dean Eckles, Cyrus Samii, and Stephanie Zonszein. In Cambridge Handbook of Advances in Experimental Political Science, edited by Donald P. Green and James Druckmann, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming. arXiv Preprint.