Abstract:

Using the food truck industry as the setting, we provide direct evidence for how information technology can complement consumption variety in cities by reducing spatial information frictions associated with locally produced goods. We document the following facts: 1) food trucks use technology to overcome a spatial information friction; 2) proliferation of technology is related to growth in food trucks; 3) food trucks use their mobility to respond to consumer taste-for-variety; and 4) growth in food trucks is positively correlated with growth in food expenditures away from home. Taken together, our results illustrate how information technology can provide a meaningful increase in variety for urban consumers.

Research paper titled Information Technology and Product Variety in the City: The Case of Food Trucks.

It's not just food variety that's increased thanks to information technology, though food trucks are one of the more peculiar instances. I lived in LA from 2006-2011, and that city's lower flatter, more dispersed distribution of retail and people might have made it an optimal ground zero for the food truck boom.

Amazon has increased our retail variety expectations. The internet and the web have increased the variety of information we expect to find with a query typed into a search engine. Information technology plus urban density are an intertwined network that overcomes much of the spatial friction of the past, which is why it's so odd to me that it's still so hard to find good versions of so many types of ethnic food in San Francisco.