Kennt Ihr das: Überteuertes Fleisch/Veganes/Lactosefreies in alten Wohnwagen – und Hipsters stehen Schlange davor? Kann man machen! Ist sogar Ausdruck und Zeichen unserer modernen Zeiten, wie schon eine Studie vor zwei Jahren herausfand:

First, growing interest in smartphones and social media lead to growing interest in food trucks at the city level, even when controlling for national trends and city heterogeneity. This confirms the broad prediction in our model that mobile technology facilitates the growth of food trucks. Second, food trucks face a significant amount of locational uncertainty and they communicate the realization of this uncertainty in real-time through smartphones and social media. This confirms that locational uncertainty is a significant friction faced by food trucks and that mobile technology helps to relax it. Third, food trucks tend to avoid recently visited locations, even though the distribution of consumers at each location is roughly the same each day. This confirms that food trucks use their mobility to capitalize on consumer taste-for-variety, and that one consequence of the growth in food trucks is an increased access to food variety.

Elliot Anenberg; Edward Kung: What’s Behind the Food Truck Phenomenon? Information Frictions and Taste-for-Variety (April 10, 2014); PDF