When more interaction is not enough: How social conditions shape collaborative culture in entrepreneurial ecosystems

Entrepreneurial ecosystems are increasingly understood as complex adaptive systems in which outcomes emerge from interactions among heterogeneous actors. Yet, how the social conditions under which entrepreneurs interact shape the emergence of collaborative culture remains underexplored. We develop a microfoundational framework that explains how macro-level social conditions shape agents' decisions and interactions, and how these decentralized actions generate collaborative culture. We implement this framework in an agent-based model that integrates a large language model into entrepreneurs' decision-making, enabling agents to combine reputational information with their behavioral orientations. The model examines three social conditions: the composition of entrepreneurs according to their willingness to give without expecting immediate returns, the diffusion of informal reputational information, and the conditions under which entrepreneurs encounter one another. Results show that populations with more give-first orientations generate more successful helping. Recurring interaction settings generate more interactions and successful helping in absolute terms, whereas random encounters produce a higher proportion of successful interactions. Reputational information is associated with reputational filtering, reflected in a persistent fitness disadvantage for opportunistic behavior under structured encounters and, in some conditions, a divergence between collaborative and opportunistic profiles. The key insight is that collaborative culture depends not simply on the amount of interaction, but on actors' ability to use reputational information to selectively direct support toward partners based on their past collaborative behavior. These findings highlight the importance of microfoundational frameworks that integrate behavioral composition, reputational information, and encounter conditions to explain the emergence of collaborative culture in entrepreneurial ecosystems.