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New Data and Analytics

How do new technologies and new means of social interaction and contagion impact productivity, consumer demand, political mobilization, and public health? How is human persuasion and behavior change caused by interactive technologies? The IDE examines the profound impact social behavior and digital experimentation has on our lives, including how it affects aspects such as political mobilization, consumer demand, information sharing, worker productivity, and even stock prices. Through our research, we show how social networks can improve social and business policy through a dramatic new scientific understanding of human behavior. Recent projects include a study of how social media can help proactively manage epidemics through social media, as well as how mobilization and tracking impact voter democratization. We conduct our research using applied statistics, experimental design, machine learning, and causal inference. Dean Eckles leads this Research Group.

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Dean Eckles, Research lead for the New Data and Analytics research group at the IDE
Working Papers Evaluating for the Long Term: Learnings from Industry

Aug 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.

Research Papers Long Ties Map

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.