Information technology innovation has given worldwide access to each other, to information, and to entirely new digital platforms forming new markets over the last decade. Multi-sided digital platforms are platforms that mediate between different groups of users, both buyers and sellers.
With IT the multi-sided platforms are exploiting the economic phenomenon known as network externalities, increase the users, increase the value of the platform.
However, the cultural differences between countries can make or break a successful entry into another national market. Simply copying the monolithic algorithms has not been the answer, as recently admitted by Amazon's departure from China.
This project looked at seemingly similar cultures (the Netherlands and Germany) to identify if the macro-level cultural dimensions influenced the acceptance and use of multi-sided platforms. This was examined through a survey that assessed the acceptance and use of online food delivery platforms, a prime example of multi-sided platforms.
The cultures do have significant differences, but their impact on the acceptance and use of online food delivery platforms was non-significant. The acceptance of online food delivery platforms still followed a 10-year different diffusion, but the significant differences on macro-level cultural dimensions did not relate to this acceptance.
An interesting conclusion to this project is that the countries, expecting to have similar cultures, are significantly different and the data gathered proves to be more substantial than this project could investigate. The UTAUT2-model did
show a significant acceptance and use of online food delivery platforms, which shows that the online food delivery platform has successfully expanded cross-culturally in the case of the Netherlands and Germany.