Dean Eckles
Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
Dean Eckles is an Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan. He is affiliate faculty at the Institute for Data, Systems & Society in the Schwarzman College of Computing. Dean is also the ‘Data and Analytics’ Research Group Lead at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.
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.
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Featured publications
August 28, 2026
- Dean Eckles | Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
- Madhav Kumar | Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School
Leif Sigerson (Pinterest), Tom Cunningham (METR), Winston Chou (Netflix), Sana Pandey (MIT CSAIL), Jonathan Stray (UC Berkeley CHAI), Lo-Hua Yuan (Airbnb ), Eytan Bakshy (Meta), Timothy Chan (Statsig), Molly Davies (Pinterest), Maria Dimakopoulou (Uber), Simon Ejdemyr (Netflix), Kenneth Hung (Meta), Nathan Kallus (Netflix & Cornell University), Thu Le (Lyft), A. Demetri Pananos (Datadog), Lee Richardson (Google), Brennan Schaffner (Knight-Georgetown Institute), Rose Tan, Martin Tingley, Nadia Tomova (Booking.com), Panagiotis Toulis (University of Chicago Booth School of Business), Wenjing Zheng (Roblox), Zander Arnao (Knight-Georgetown Institute), Dean Eckles (MIT)
This paper collects and shares industry knowledge on how to make decisions from short-term experiments that are better aligned with long-term outcomes. Based on a daylong workshop with 26 experts from 15 online platforms and 4 universities, it formulates a series of propositions that reflect current industry knowledge.
August 28, 2026
- Dean Eckles | Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
This map details the correlation between evidence of economic well-being and a greater number of long ties — people whom you know but with whom you share no other mutual connections.
June 15, 2026
- Dean Eckles | Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
This paper asks under what conditions do social corrections promote engagement from corrected users, allowing for greater insight into how users respond to debunking messages (even if such responses are negative).
June 15, 2025
- Dean Eckles | Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
This randomized social media field experiment provides evidence that people are indeed disposed to form ties that close open triangles in their social networks.
April 1, 2024
- David Rand | Research Affiliate and Professor at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business
- Dean Eckles | Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
Hause Lin
Haritz Garro
Nils Wernerfelt
Jesse Shore
Adam Hughes
Daniel Deisenroth
Nathaniel Barr
Adam Berinsky
Gordon Pennycook
February 11, 2024
- Dean Eckles | Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
- Madhav Kumar | Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School
Diego Aparicio
February 8, 2024
- David Rand | Research Affiliate and Professor at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business
- Dean Eckles | Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
Hause Lin, Haritz Garro
Nils Wernerfelt
Jesse Conan Shore
Adam Hughes
Daniel Deisenroth
Nathaniel Barr
Adam Berinsky
Gordon Pennycook
January 10, 2023
- Avinash Collis | Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
- Dean Eckles | Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
- Sinan Aral | Director, MIT IDE; Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management