Disclosures – Dean Eckles

Potentially competing interests

Dean Eckles is currently an employee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

D.E. was previously a consultant to Twitter. D.E. was previously a contractor of Microsoft, as a visiting researcher to Microsoft Research New England. D.E. was a consultant to and has a SFI in GoFundMe. D.E. was previously an employee of Nokia and Yahoo.

D.E. was previously an employee and contractor of Facebook (now Meta), and previously had a significant financial interest (SFI) in Facebook.

D.E. has SFIs in Amazon, Alphabet, and Salesforce.

D.E. received (from 2017 to 2020) some scholarly funding via a professorship endowed in 1983 by Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co. (KDD), which is now part of KDDI Corporation. Similarly, D.E. received (from 2020 to 2023) scholarly funding via a professorship endowed by Mitsubishi.

Some of D.E.’s research is or has been funded by Amazon, Boston Globe Media, Meta, IBM, the US Air Force (via a subcontract from Lincoln Laboratory), and The World Bank, and his work as a graduate student was previously supported by funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Nokia.

D.E. is an inventor of patents assigned to Stanford University and Meta.

D.E.’s travel to or lodging at conferences has been supported by universities and various additional funders, including Microsoft, Vail Resorts, Marketing Science Institute, Technology Crossover Ventures, Meta, Center for Open Science, DARPA, and NSF.

D.E. has been an organizer of the Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE@MIT), during which period it has been sponsored by Amazon, Booking.com, Meta, and Netflix.

D.E. sometimes conducts research via both data use agreements with unnamed firms (e.g., retailers, Internet companies, and fitness companies) and by advising research by collaborators, often students, who are employees or consultants of other firms (e.g., Meta, Stitch Fix, Microsoft).

The disclosures here are intended to be consistent with the definitions (e.g., of SFI) in MIT’s policies.

Featured work

Long ties, disruptive life events and economic prosperity. PNAS.
50 years after Granovetter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties”, we provide new evidence of the connection between network structure and economic prosperity. We also show how multiple life events, such as switching high schools, can result in more long ties, even decades later. This paper is accompanied by new public data on the Facebook networks of US and Mexican zip codes .

Algorithmic transparency and assessing effects of algorithmic ranking. Testimony before the US Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband.
This addresses the questions: How does algorithmic ranking in social media work? How can we assess algorithmic impact & amplification? What can policy-makers do here?

Seeding with costly network information. Operations Research.
Because of their position in a social network, some people can be much more influential than others, and so marketers and others often want to target them as “seeds”. But, outside of specific cases, one doesn’t fully observe the social network, but must probe it (with costly surveys or crawling). We develop techniques for selecting good seeds in arbitrary networks while limiting how much we need to probe the network.

Providing normative information increases intentions to accept a COVID-19 vaccine. Nature Communications.
When does sharing information about others’ behaviors cause more of that same behavior? This is both a central question in the social sciences and also important for effecting preventative health behaviors, including vaccination. We use a randomized experiment embedded in the international survey on COVID-19 we conducted with Meta and JHU to address this, providing evidence that these descriptive norms increase intentions to get vaccinated.