Bidding for courses?

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/the-coase-theorem-rules-at-nyu-law/

Here's an interesting approach to course registration. Even more interesting to me is that in the response section it is clear a lot of schools have a points/bidding system for courses in which all students start with an equal number of points (that can be increased or decreased by various things such as seniority) which they then use to bid in multiple rounds on the classes they want. That kind of information would potentially tell an administrator like me a lot about which courses, majors, and professors were the most popular. Hmm . . .