Fresh Beer at Market Prices

Roland Fryer is a very enterprising young economist at Harvard whose early work, much of it in collaboration with Steve Levitt, is featured in Freakonomics.

Roland’s creativity is not limited to academic economics. A while back, he told me his idea for opening a bar in Cambridge where an electronic tote board would list the prices of the beers and each beer would rise or fall in price throughout the night depending on demand.

Well, someone beat him to it. It’s in Berlin and is called the Broker’s Bier Borse; here’s a blog entry about it.

How do you think the market would play out in such a bar? If you were spending the night there with friends, how would you behave? Would you behave differently if you were drinking alone?

(Hat tip: Nils Thingvall)