Events

Colloquium

Policy Relevance of Causal Quantities in Networks

Speaker: Dean Eckles (MIT) William F. Pounds Professor of Management and Marketing Massachusetts Institute of Technology Wednesday, February 25, 2026 11:30AM - 1:00PM Lunch at 11:30am in 1307 Talk 12:00-1:00pm in 1327 Location: Yale Institute for Foundations of Data Science & Webcast, 219 Prospect Street, 13th Floor, New Haven, CT 06511 and via Webcast: https://yale.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=8feb8848-6f14-4660-8c35-b3ca01474ab5

Abstract: In settings where units’ outcomes are affected by others’ treatments, there has been a proliferation of ways to quantify effects of treatments on outcomes. Here we describe how many proposed estimands can be represented as involving one of two ways of averaging over units and treatment assignments. The more common representation often results in quantities that are often irrelevant, or at least insufficient, for optimal choice of policies governing treatment assignment. The other representation often yields quantities that lack an interpretation as summaries of unit-level causal effects, but that we argue may still be relevant to policy choice. Among various estimands, the expected average outcome — or its contrast between two different policies — can be represented both ways and, we argue, merits further attention. Joint work with Sahil Loomba.

Speaker Bio: Dean Eckles is the William F. Pounds Professor of Management and a Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan. He is Associate Director of the Institute for Data, Systems & Society in the Schwarzman College of Computing.

His substantive research examines people’s interactions with and through communication technologies, especially the ways these technologies mediate 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 and Nokia.

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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