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I am a social scientist and statistician. Much of my research is on social influence that is mediated by interactive technologies. The design of systems, interventions, and methods is sometimes both a means and an end.
I am a member of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty, in the Marketing group. I am affiliated with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing via the Institute for Data, Systems & Society, including its Statistics and Data Science Center. I lead the analytics research area at the Initiative on the Digital Economy, via which we also organize the annual Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE@MIT).
The principal subjects of my research are
- social interactions, contagion, and interventions in networks
- experimental design and inference in networks
- methods for causal inference
Multiple of these often end up appearing together in a single project.
I try to use Twitter (@deaneckles) and, less often, my blog and the Gelman et al. blog to share ideas and report on research in a more immediate and informal way than scholarly publications. I’m even on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.