Dean Eckles

Interdependence and the cost of uncoordinated responses to COVID-19. PNAS.

We study spillovers of local and state non-pharmaceutical interventions to prevent COVID-19 spread. Mobility behaviors in one place are substantially influenced by the policies and behaviors of people in other, sometimes distant, regions. Our theoretical model shows how this results in a substantial “loss from anarchy”.

Bias and high-dimensional adjustment in observational studies of peer effects. JASA.

Are observational studies informative about social contagion? We use a massive randomized experiment in Facebook News Feed to identify peer effects in link sharing and compare these results to those using only observational data, but adjusting for high-dimensional covariates. The richest models are able to recover the experimental “gold standard” peer effect, at least for the most popular classes of behavior.

Estimating peer effects in networks with peer encouragement designs. PNAS.

We employ a novel experimental design to modulate how many likes and comments are received by 49 million Facebook users, allowing us to estimate network effects in adoption and use of communication technologies.