Abstract:     The level of regional start-up cost is an important indicator to determine whether, where and when entrepreneurs start businesses. Entrepreneurs′ subjective perception of the entrepreneurial environment, local government support, the abundance of regional talent reserve, the difficulty of financing and other factors will also affect entrepreneurs′ entrepreneurial intention. The research showed that there is a certain deviation between objective start-up cost and subjective cost perception of entrepreneurs in some cities, which results in obvious differences in subjective and objective rankings of policy environment cost, financing availability and technology availability. Therefore, in the case of differences between subjective and objective start-up costs, entrepreneurs′ subjective perception of local start-up costs will become the core factor that directly affects their entrepreneurial intention.Previous studies have found that business cost, environmental cost, regulation cost, financing cost and investment cost have a heterogeneous impact on entrepreneurial intention. Some scholars also analyze the impact of urban entrepreneurial cost perception on entrepreneurial willingness and entrepreneurial effectiveness. However, existing scholars tend to focus on explicit costs such as human cost and study their impact on entrepreneurial willingness from a single dimension, while few studies take hidden costs such as financing environment into account, or integrate multiple cost dimensions to study their impact on entrepreneurial willingness. However, the impact of start-up cost on start-up intention is a complex process under the synergistic action of multiple factors, which needs to consider the synergistic linkage of multiple cost factors. Therefore, it is very important to explore the impact of start-up cost perception configuration effect on start-up intention.In addition, previous studies mostly explored the "net effect" of a single factor′s influence on entrepreneurial intention based on traditional regression analysis methods. Meanwhile, the analysis method of moderating variables was used to try to answer the configuration effect. However, in such studies, it was difficult to answer the configuration effect of multiple factors (especially more than three factors), and it was unable to dig out a clearer causal complex mechanism. Therefore, it is impossible to elucidate the configuration effect of synergistic entrepreneurial cost factors on entrepreneurial intention. Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) based on configuration thinking can effectively overcome the limitations of traditional analysis methods and fully explore the influence mechanism of the linkage effect of multiple levels of antecedent variables on entrepreneurial intention.In view of this, in order to systematically deconstruct the combination of antecedents of entrepreneurial intention driven by entrepreneurial costs, this paper divided entrepreneurial costs into explicit costs and invisible costs from the perspective of the whole entrepreneurial cost and according to relevant concepts in economics, and constructed an entrepreneurial cost evaluation system. Taking 29 representative cities in China as samples, the fsQCA method was adopted to explore the relationship between different configurations composed of 7 antecedent variables and entrepreneurial intention, and explore the promotion path of entrepreneurial intention.The results showed that: (1) driving entrepreneurial intention has the characteristics of "multiple concurrency" and "common destination", and a single entrepreneurial cost factor does not constitute the necessary condition for the generation of entrepreneurial intention; (2) The activation mechanism of high entrepreneurial intention can be divided into four main paths: explicit cost-driven, social environment-driven, comprehensive cost-driven and explicit cost-technology-driven; (3) Under specific start-up cost conditions, economic environment cost and business cost have substitution relationship in the production process of high entrepreneurial intention; (4) Technology entrepreneurs are more sensitive to explicit costs in the start-up stage and more sensitive to the policy environment in the growth stage. The research conclusion is helpful to clarify the composition of start-up costs, explore the sensitive cost factors that affect entrepreneurial intention, and it has important theoretical and practical significance for stimulating entrepreneurial vitality in different regions and creating a good regional entrepreneurial ecology.

Key words: entrepreneurial cost perception, entrepreneurial intention, configuration thinking, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method