Platform Competition at the Gulf’s Doorstep: Keeta’s Entry into the GCC and the Reconfiguration of Food-Delivery Power

Authors: Walid Ahmad ¹, Hassan Aref ¹

¹ Affiliation: King Abdulaziz University

Received 16 June 2025; Revised 25 August 2025; Accepted 24 September 2025; Available online 06 October 2025; Version of Record 06 October 2025.

https://doi.org/10.65326/u7y566748

Volume 2, December 2025 (10015)

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Abstract

This article examines a fast-moving development in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) digital economy: the arrival and rapid scaling of Keeta, an international food-delivery platform, alongside visible shifts in pricing and promotional tactics by incumbent rivals in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and neighboring markets. Drawing on theories of two-sided platforms, Bourdieu’s forms of capital, world-systems analysis, and institutional isomorphism, the paper frames Keeta’s expansion as a strategic market-entry maneuver that triggers defensive price and product responses, accelerates innovation adoption (e.g., last-mile automation), and pressures value distribution among consumers, couriers, and merchants. Methodologically, the study synthesizes contemporary reports and secondary data with established scholarly frameworks to generate a theory-informed interpretation suitable for managerial and policy decision-making. The article proposes measurable indicators for tracking competitive intensity and sustainability, outlines scenarios for the next 12–24 months, and concludes with recommendations for regulators, platforms, and merchants.

Keywords: GCC digital economy; food delivery; platform competition; pricing strategy; institutional isomorphism; Bourdieu; world-systems

1. Introduction

The food-delivery sector in the Gulf Cooperation Council has matured into a data-intensive marketplace in which user acquisition, logistics efficiency, and merchant economics determine competitive position. For several years the market settled into a relatively stable arrangement dominated by a small number of incumbents. The arrival of Keeta, a challenger supported by substantial external capital and an established operating model, unsettled that arrangement and prompted visible adjustments in pricing, promotions, and service among established rivals. Such episodes are analytically valuable because they expose, in a compressed period, the strategic logic that ordinarily remains latent in a settled oligopoly.

Explaining this kind of episode requires more than one disciplinary vocabulary. The economics of two-sided markets accounts for why platforms subsidise one side of the market to ignite cross-group network effects, and why competition centres on price and participation rather than on the underlying service alone (Rochet & Tirole, 2003; Armstrong, 2006). It is less equipped to explain why rivals’ promotions, interfaces, and messaging come to resemble one another, why a particular national market acquires disproportionate signalling weight, or how non-financial resources such as operational know-how and reputation shape who prevails. Sociological accounts of organisational fields and of capital address precisely these questions, but are seldom brought to bear on the competitive mechanics of platform entry. The premise of this article is that the two literatures are complementary, and that platform entry in the GCC is a setting where their integration is both feasible and revealing.

The article therefore pursues three questions. First, how can an entrant’s strategy in a two-sided food-delivery market be understood as the conversion of financial resources into the social and symbolic assets that scale requires? Second, what field-level pressures explain the observable convergence of competitive tactics among entrant and incumbents? Third, how does the resulting rivalry distribute value and risk among consumers, couriers, and merchants, and what does this imply for regulators? In answering these questions the analysis treats Keeta’s entry as an illustrative case rather than as an object of measurement, and develops propositions intended to guide subsequent empirical work.

2. The GCC Food-Delivery Field

The GCC combines dense urban corridors, high smartphone penetration, and sustained demand for convenience services, conditions under which on-demand food delivery scales readily. National digitalisation programmes have reinforced these conditions by treating digital services as instruments of economic diversification, even as the regional labour market continues to depend heavily on migrant workers and to face shortages of advanced digital skills (Bousrih, Elhaj, & Hassan, 2022). Consumer adoption of delivery applications in comparable markets has been shown to hinge on technology readiness and on situational accelerants, with optimism and innovativeness raising adoption intentions while perceived insecurity dampens them (Ali, Khalid, Javed, & Islam, 2020). These adoption dynamics matter for competitive strategy because they determine how responsive demand is to the discounts and reliability guarantees on which platforms compete.

Over recent years incumbents in the United Arab Emirates and neighbouring markets consolidated share and standardised operational practice. Into this setting an entrant of Keeta’s scale functions as a strategic shock: by committing resources to local presence, expanding merchant coverage, and investing in delivery capability, it alters the expectations of consumers, restaurants, and couriers simultaneously. The remainder of the article reads this shock through four theoretical lenses and then specifies the mechanisms and propositions that follow.

3. Theoretical Framework

The framework combines four perspectives. Each is introduced in turn, with attention to what it contributes and where it requires supplementation by the others.

3.1 Two-sided markets and the economics of entry

Platforms create value by enabling interaction between distinct user groups whose participation generates cross-group externalities; an additional consumer raises the value of the platform to merchants and couriers, and vice versa (Rochet & Tirole, 2003). Because these externalities must be ignited before they can be monetised, platforms commonly subsidise the more price-sensitive or harder-to-attract side, often pricing below cost during the build-out phase (Rietveld & Schilling, 2021). Equilibrium prices and the allocation of subsidy across sides depend on the magnitude of the externalities, on whether participants single-home or multi-home, and on the structure of fees; where one side multi-homes and the other does not, the platform gains bottleneck power over access to its single-homing users (Armstrong, 2006). In food delivery, switching costs are low and multi-homing is common on both the consumer and merchant sides, which limits any single platform’s ability to lock in participants and sustains continual price signalling. Competition in such markets departs from the predictions of mainstream competitive theory because rivalry runs along two strategic dimensions at once — the scale of a platform’s network and the distinctiveness of its identity — and because rivalry can drive convergence of market boundaries rather than stable differentiation (Cennamo, 2021).

3.2 Forms of capital

Bourdieu’s account of economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital provides a vocabulary for the resources that platform competition mobilises, and for their convertibility (Bourdieu, 1986). Economic capital funds the subsidies and onboarding incentives that two-sided competition requires. Cultural capital takes the form of codified operating routines, logistics algorithms, and the expertise embodied in specialised teams. Social capital resides in the dense ties an operator holds with merchants, couriers, and public authorities. Symbolic capital is the recognition a platform accumulates as fast, reliable, and innovative. The analytical purchase of this perspective lies in convertibility: a challenger with abundant economic capital can attempt to convert it rapidly into the social and symbolic capital that an incumbent has accumulated more slowly, while incumbents defend by drawing on cultural capital to sustain service quality when promotional pressure intensifies.

3.3 World-systems analysis and gateway markets

World-systems analysis distinguishes core, semi-periphery, and periphery, and directs attention to the structural position a market occupies within wider flows of capital and standards (Wallerstein, 1974). For platform strategy the relevant insight is that some markets function as gateways: high-income nodes with advanced infrastructure and regulatory predictability whose competitive outcomes carry demonstration value for adjacent markets. Practices proven in such a node — merchant terms, interface conventions, promotional calendars — diffuse outward at reduced cost. This perspective reframes entry into a gateway market as a bid for a position from which subsequent expansion is cheaper, rather than as a self-contained regional play.

3.4 Institutional isomorphism

Organisations operating in the same field tend toward similarity through coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Coercive pressures arise from regulation governing labour, safety, and consumer protection, pushing operators toward comparable compliance regimes; the prospect of binding regulation can itself shape conduct, and platforms may pre-empt it through self-regulation when a credible regulatory threat exists (Cusumano, Gawer, & Yoffie, 2021). Mimetic pressures operate under uncertainty, as firms imitate the visible, low-risk tactics of apparently successful rivals. Normative pressures travel through shared professional communities — data-science methods, logistics performance metrics, and platform-governance conventions — reinforced by mobility of personnel across operators. Together these pressures predict that a high-profile entry will be followed by convergence in the form of competitive tactics even where the substance of strategy differs.

3.5 The research gap

Two bodies of work bear directly on platform entry yet rarely meet. The strategic and economic literature on platform competition specifies how network effects, subsidies, and multi-homing shape pricing and value capture, but treats the social embeddedness of platforms and the symbolic dimension of competition as residual (Rietveld & Schilling, 2021; Kretschmer, Leiponen, Schilling, & Vasudeva, 2022). The sociological literature on platform work and platform power explains how platforms exercise concentrated control while externalising responsibility, and how their architectures shape labour and value distribution, but engages only loosely with the competitive mechanics of entry and incumbent response (Vallas & Schor, 2020). Neither literature has examined a high-income gateway market such as the GCC, where the conditions for rapid capital conversion and field convergence are unusually favourable. The contribution of this article is to bridge these accounts in a single framework and to apply it to this setting, generating propositions that connect an entrant’s resource endowment to field-level outcomes and to the distribution of value among participants.

4. Method and Analytical Approach

The study adopts a conceptual, theory-elaboration design. Theory elaboration is appropriate when established theories exist but their joint implications for a new empirical domain are not worked out; the aim is to refine and combine existing constructs rather than to test hypotheses or to build theory inductively from the ground up. The design proceeds abductively, moving between the observable features of the focal case and the four theoretical lenses to identify the mechanisms that most economically account for the pattern of entry and response.

Keeta’s entry into the GCC serves as a single illustrative case, selected on three criteria: theoretical relevance, in that it instantiates entry by a well-capitalised challenger into a maturing two-sided market; informational accessibility, in that the relevant competitive moves are publicly observable; and contemporaneity, in that the episode is recent enough to reflect current platform practice. The evidence base is qualitative: it synthesises contemporary reporting and secondary sources on the episode and interprets them through the four established frameworks, so that the account remains theory-informed and usable for managerial and policy reasoning while avoiding reliance on confidential data. The case is used to illustrate and discipline the framework, not as a basis for statistical generalisation. Analytical generalisation — the extension of theoretical mechanisms to comparable settings — is the intended mode of inference.

The analytical procedure has three stages. First, the publicly observable features of the episode — entry commitments, subsidy and promotional activity, service and merchant-facing adjustments, and investment in delivery capability — are characterised at the level of strategic logic rather than at the level of unverified specifics, so that no claim depends on figures or events that cannot be substantiated. Second, each feature is interpreted through the four lenses, and the interpretations are cross-checked for convergence and tension. Third, the mechanisms that recur across lenses are stated as propositions. The scope of the argument is bounded accordingly: it concerns entry by deep-capital challengers into high-income, infrastructure-rich food-delivery markets with low switching costs and prevalent multi-homing. It does not purport to describe markets with high switching costs, weak digital infrastructure, or single-homing users, where the mechanisms would operate differently. Because the evidence base is interpretive, the analysis advances conjectures rather than findings, and is explicit about that status throughout.

5. Analysis

5.1 The entrant’s strategy as capital conversion

An entrant’s opening moves can be read as instruments of network formation rather than as marketing expenditure. Commitments to a local presence and to expanding merchant coverage operate as credible signals that the entrant intends to remain, which deters incumbents from assuming that subsidies will soon be withdrawn and the challenger will retreat. Consumer-side subsidies such as launch discounts and free-delivery periods, together with merchant-side incentives such as reduced commissions and onboarding support, function to alter habits on both sides quickly: to induce a first order and an experience of reliability among consumers, and to make listing and fulfilment attractive to merchants (Rochet & Tirole, 2003; Rietveld & Schilling, 2021). In Bourdieusian terms, the entrant converts economic capital into social capital — a merchant network and a courier pool — and into symbolic capital, the recognition attached to visible scale and novelty (Bourdieu, 1986). Investment in delivery capability and in advanced last-mile options, where regulation permits, contributes to the same symbolic project by associating the entrant with speed and technological seriousness, an association that resonates in markets that prize early adoption.

5.2 Incumbent response: price, service, and merchant economics

Because consumers are promotion-sensitive and switching costs are low, an entrant’s subsidy strategy places incumbents on the defensive, and an increase in vouchers, free-delivery windows, and percentage-off events follows as a near-term response (Armstrong, 2006). Price, however, is the trigger for attention rather than the engine of retention. Incumbents can defend by drawing on accumulated cultural capital — local operating knowledge and established customer-experience routines — to sustain reliability through promotional spikes, and by widening assortment beyond restaurants into adjacent categories so that consumer lifetime value rests on basket mix rather than on discounting alone (Cennamo, 2021). On the merchant side, lower commissions and preferential placement act as merchant-side subsidies; over time incumbents may recalibrate fee schedules, provide performance dashboards, or extend partner designations to protect relationships with high-volume brands. The structural consequence is multi-homing: merchants list across several platforms while developing their own direct channels, which raises their bargaining power when platforms compete but only to the extent that merchants can read and negotiate terms effectively (Kretschmer et al., 2022).

5.3 Gateway dynamics

The competitive episode carries weight beyond the focal market because of the gateway position the leading GCC market occupies. Practices tested there — merchant terms, interface conventions, and promotional calendars — can be replicated across neighbouring markets at reduced cost, so that a foothold in the gateway lowers the expense of subsequent entry (Wallerstein, 1974). This demonstration effect raises the strategic stakes of the contest: a win is valuable not only for the share it secures locally but for the template it establishes regionally. It also explains why a challenger may accept thin or negative margins in the gateway longer than the local market alone would justify, since the payoff is partly an option on cheaper expansion elsewhere.

5.4 Isomorphic convergence

Under the uncertainty that an entry creates, operators imitate one another’s most visible and least risky tactics, producing convergence in promotional formats, interface patterns, and notification cadences (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Convergence in tactics has a paradoxical effect: as offers come to resemble one another, the basis of differentiation shifts toward identity and symbolic capital, so that the operator able to articulate the most credible forward-looking position — around speed, reliability, or merchant enablement — can distinguish itself even when prices are similar (Cennamo, 2021). Coercive pressures shape the field in parallel, as regulation of labour, safety, and last-mile operations pushes operators toward comparable compliance regimes, with the prospect of binding rules itself influencing conduct (Cusumano et al., 2021).

5.5 Distribution of value and risk

In the near term consumers gain from lower effective prices and wider choice, though promotion-driven cycles can also produce choice overload, and post-promotion prices may rise as operators normalise margins; the durable question is whether the new arrangement delivers value beyond temporary discounts in the form of reliability and coverage (Ali et al., 2020). For merchants, intensified competition and multi-homing can improve negotiating leverage during launch windows, yet dependence on marketplaces can deepen if direct channels are neglected; the entrant’s pursuit of merchant scale is also, in effect, the production of data assets that accrue to the platform rather than to the merchant (van Doorn & Badger, 2020).

Couriers occupy the most exposed position. Higher order volumes can raise earnings opportunities, but tighter on-time targets and algorithmic dispatch can compress per-order pay and intensify effort. Platform control over couriers operates through the architecture of the application itself — directing through restriction and recommendation, evaluating through recording and rating, and disciplining through the allocation and withdrawal of work — a repertoire that constitutes a contested terrain rather than neutral coordination (Kellogg, Valentine, & Christin, 2020). Labour-process studies of food delivery document how information asymmetries and opaque performance management extend this control while presenting it as flexibility (Veen, Barratt, & Goods, 2020; Wood, Graham, Lehdonvirta, & Hjorth, 2019), and how incentive design and gamification are tuned to keep couriers logged in and working (van Doorn & Chen, 2021). These conditions carry real corporeal risk, which regulatory inaction can entrench (Orr, Henne, Lee, Harb, & Alphonso, 2023), and they generate the antagonism from which courier mobilisation has emerged elsewhere (Tassinari & Maccarrone, 2020). Viewed together, these dynamics support the characterisation of platforms as actors that exercise concentrated power while externalising responsibility onto workers and merchants (Vallas & Schor, 2020). Regulators consequently face a trilemma between encouraging innovation, protecting workers and consumers, and maintaining public safety, which the calibration of coercive pressure must address without foreclosing beneficial experimentation (Cusumano et al., 2021).

6. Theoretical Propositions

The mechanisms identified above can be stated as propositions. They are conjectures derived from the integrated framework and the focal case, intended for examination with merchant, courier, and transaction-level data rather than as established results.

Proposition 1. The more abundant an entrant’s economic capital relative to incumbents, the more aggressively it will deploy two-sided subsidies to convert that capital into social and symbolic capital during the network-formation phase.

Proposition 2. Where consumer switching costs are low and multi-homing is prevalent, an entrant’s subsidy strategy will provoke a near-term price-promotion response from incumbents, while durable advantage will accrue to the operator that sustains service reliability by mobilising cultural capital.

Proposition 3. The greater the demonstration value of the focal market as a regional gateway, the longer an entrant will tolerate thin or negative margins there, because the payoff includes reduced costs of subsequent entry into adjacent markets.

Proposition 4. Mimetic and normative pressures will drive convergence in the visible tactics of competing platforms; as tactics converge, differentiation will shift toward platform identity and symbolic capital.

Proposition 5. Intensified platform competition will transiently raise merchant bargaining power, but the advantage will erode where merchants fail to develop direct channels, because competition simultaneously expands the platform’s capture of merchant-derived data assets.

Proposition 6. The distribution of value from heightened competition will favour consumers in the short run and platforms in the longer run, while couriers’ outcomes will depend on how operators balance utilisation against compensation and safety under algorithmic management.

7. Discussion

The framework contributes to each of the four literatures it draws upon, and to the debates that run between them. To the economics of two-sided markets it adds a sociological account of the resources that subsidy strategies are meant to acquire. The standard model explains why an entrant subsidises participation to ignite cross-group externalities (Rochet & Tirole, 2003; Armstrong, 2006); the present account specifies what the subsidies purchase — social and symbolic capital — and why incumbents’ cultural capital is a credible line of defence (Bourdieu, 1986). This reframing speaks to the long-standing tension between winner-take-all dynamics and persistent multi-homing in platform competition (Rietveld & Schilling, 2021; Kretschmer et al., 2022): where capital conversion is incomplete and multi-homing is cheap, the market need not tip, and competition settles into a contest over identity rather than scale alone (Cennamo, 2021).

To institutional theory the analysis offers a competitive micro-foundation for field convergence. It treats the convergence of promotional and interface tactics not merely as the diffusion of legitimated practice but as the rational, low-risk response of operators under entry-induced uncertainty, and it links the resulting homogenisation to a shift in the locus of differentiation toward symbolic capital (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Cennamo, 2021). To world-systems analysis it contributes a platform-strategic reading of gateway position, showing how the demonstration value of a high-income node enters the entrant’s calculus directly (Wallerstein, 1974). And to the sociology of platform work it connects the distribution of value and risk to the competitive process that produces it, rather than treating platform power as a static attribute (Vallas & Schor, 2020; Kellogg et al., 2020).

The analysis also engages the debate on the entrant’s position in a multisided ecosystem. A challenger that disrupts a settled arrangement depends on the cooperation of the very merchants and couriers whose terms it seeks to reset, a dependence that disciplines how aggressively it can act and that favours coopetitive rather than purely adversarial conduct (Ansari, Garud, & Kumaraswamy, 2016). This qualifies any straightforward reading of entry as displacement and helps explain why incumbents and entrant alike invest in merchant tooling and partner relations even amid a price contest. Finally, the regulatory implications follow from the framework rather than being appended to it: because coercive pressure shapes the field and because the credible threat of regulation can itself alter conduct, the calibration of labour, safety, and last-mile rules is part of the competitive environment, not external to it (Cusumano et al., 2021; Orr et al., 2023).

8. Scenarios over the Next 12–24 Months

The propositions support three analytical scenarios for the short to medium term. They are conditional sketches that follow from the framework rather than forecasts, and each becomes more or less likely depending on the strength of the mechanisms identified above.

In the first scenario, disciplined coexistence, promotional intensity converges at sustainable levels and operators differentiate through reliability, assortment breadth, and loyalty rather than through discounting alone. Consumers retain moderate price benefits alongside firmer service guarantees, and merchants face stable multi-homing economics. This path is consistent with Propositions 2 and 4 and is more likely where regulators signal clear expectations on fair competition and worker protection.

In the second scenario, promotion intensification, one or more operators prioritise share over margin and sustain deep, frequent discounts. Short-term consumer surplus rises sharply, but the medium-term risks include fee creep, courier strain, and uneven merchant relief; absent patient capital, such a contest tends to be self-limiting. This path follows from Propositions 1 and 6 and is the least stable of the three.

In the third scenario, capability-led repositioning, advantage shifts from subsidy toward productivity as an operator converts symbolic and cultural capital into a durable cost advantage through logistics and dispatch improvements, including last-mile automation where regulation permits. Price leadership then rests on genuine efficiency rather than transfers, and public authorities become partners in scaling safe automation. This path extends Proposition 2 and is contingent on the calibration of coercive pressure discussed above.

9. Implications for Regulators, Platforms, and Merchants

For platforms, whether entrant or incumbent, the analysis recommends moving beyond blanket subsidies toward targeted, loyalty-linked offers that conserve economic capital while still building participation, and investing deliberately in symbolic capital through a coherent position on speed, reliability, and merchant enablement that differentiates the service when prices converge (Cennamo, 2021; Rietveld & Schilling, 2021). Deepening merchant tooling — transparent dashboards, tested placements, and co-funded campaigns — raises merchant retention without raising nominal commissions, and protecting couriers through safety protocols, fair-pay floors, and transparent dispatch reduces operational and reputational risk under algorithmic management (Kellogg, Valentine, & Christin, 2020).

For merchants, the implication is to negotiate on effective commission net of promotions and co-marketing credits rather than on headline rates, and to use the window of platform competition to develop first-party channels and loyalty so that marketplace exposure seeds owned demand rather than entrenching dependence (Kretschmer, Leiponen, Schilling, & Vasudeva, 2022; van Doorn & Badger, 2020). For regulators, the recommendation is to set transparent guardrails on courier safety, insurance, and last-mile operations, to monitor pricing conduct for predatory patterns while allowing consumer-beneficial promotion, and to align platform incentives with congestion and sustainability goals; because the credible prospect of regulation itself shapes conduct, such guardrails are part of the competitive environment rather than external to it (Cusumano, Gawer, & Yoffie, 2021; Orr, Henne, Lee, Harb, & Alphonso, 2023).

10. Limitations and Future Research

The analysis is conceptual and interpretive. It rests on publicly observable competitive moves rather than on confidential unit economics or contract terms, and its propositions have not been tested. The single-case design supports analytical but not statistical generalisation, and the scope conditions — low switching costs, prevalent multi-homing, and a high-income, infrastructure-rich gateway market — bound the claims accordingly. The framework integrates four perspectives that carry differing assumptions, and the synthesis privileges their complementarities over their tensions; alternative weightings might yield different emphases.

Several lines of empirical work would test and refine the propositions. Transaction-level price tracking by city and cuisine would allow estimation of how effective prices and promotion intensity evolve through and after an entry, bearing on Propositions 1, 2, and 6. Merchant surveys and interviews would test whether competition durably shifts bargaining power and whether direct-channel development moderates platform dependence, bearing on Proposition 5. Courier earnings panels combined with study of dispatch and incentive design would clarify how utilisation, compensation, and safety co-vary under algorithmic management, bearing on Proposition 6. Comparative work across GCC cities would test the gateway mechanism in Proposition 3 and examine how regulatory and infrastructural differences mediate the speed of isomorphic convergence and the durability of symbolic-capital advantages in Proposition 4. The proposed indicators in Table 1 are offered to support such work.

Table 1. Proposed observable indicators for empirical study of platform-competition intensity.

Indicator	Construct captured	Related proposition
Effective price index	Average basket value net of discounts and delivery credits, tracked by city and cuisine	P1, P2, P6
Promotion intensity	Number and depth of live offers per user over a fixed period	P2, P4
On-time reliability	Share of orders delivered within the promised window	P2
Merchant multi-homing rate	Share of high-volume merchants listed on three or more platforms	P5
Courier utilisation	Orders per active hour, adjusted for waiting time, alongside safety measures	P6
Assortment breadth	Count of active merchants and adjacent non-restaurant categories	P5, P6

Note. The indicators are proposed for future empirical research and are not measured in this article. They are intended as observable proxies for the constructs in the framework and are mapped to the propositions in Section 6.

11. Conclusion

Keeta’s entry into the GCC offers a setting in which the strategic and sociological logics of platform competition can be observed together. The contribution of this article is an integrated framework that explains entry and incumbent response as the conversion of economic capital into social and symbolic assets, the convergence of competitive tactics as a field-level response to uncertainty, and the redistribution of value and risk as an outcome of the competitive process rather than a fixed property of platforms. Read through this framework, the leading GCC market is a gateway whose competitive outcomes carry regional signalling weight, which raises the stakes of the contest beyond its local scale. The framework is offered as a basis for empirical examination; the propositions it yields specify where such examination should begin, and the implications drawn for regulators, platforms, and merchants indicate how the parties to this rivalry might act on it.

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