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How social influence drives online gift giving
Receiving a gift makes you 56 percent more likely to do some giving of your own.
Faculty
Dean Eckles
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Dean Eckles is the KDD Career Development Professor in Communications and Technology and an Assistant Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan. He is affiliate faculty at the Institute for Data, Systems & Society.
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.
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.
"Exact P-values for Network Interference."
Athey, Susan, Dean Eckles, and Guido W. Imbens. Journal of the American Statistical Association. Forthcoming.
"Learning causal effects from many randomized experiments using regularized instrumental variables."
Alexander Peysakhovich, and Dean Eckles. In Proceedings of the Web Conference 2018, Forthcoming.
"Randomized experiments to detect and estimate social influence in networks."
Taylor, Sean J., and Dean Eckles. In Spreading Dynamics in Social Systems, Springer Nature, Forthcoming.
"Social Influence and Political Mobilization: Further Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election."
Jones, Jason J., Robert M. Bond, Eytan Bakshy, Dean Eckles, and James H. Fowler. PloS one Vol. 12, No. 4 (2017): e0173851.
Recent Insights
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MIT Sloan study shows how technology can increase gift giving
In a study by MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Dean Eckles, he found that online gifting increases the likelihood that others will send gifts.