Social Influence Given (Partially) Deliberate Matching: Career Imprints in the Creation of Academic Entrepreneurs

Actors and associates often match on a few dimensions that matter most for the relationship at hand. In so doing, they are exposed to unanticipated social influences because counterparts have broader attitudes and preferences than would-be contacts considered when they first chose to pair. The authors label as partially deliberate social matching that occurs on a small set of attributes, and they present empirical methods for identifying causal social influence effects when relationships follow this generative logic. A data set tracking the training and professional activities of academic biomedical scientists is used to show that young scientists adopt their advisers' orientations toward commercial science as evidenced by adviser-to-advisee transmission of patenting behavior. The authors demonstrate this in two-stage models that account for the endogeneity of matching, using both inverse probability of treatment weights and an instrumental variables approach. They also draw on qualitative methods to support a causal interpretation. Overall, they present a theory and a triangulation of methods to establish evidence of social influence when tie formation is partially deliberate.