A Paradox of Telecommuting and Staggered Work Hours in the Bottleneck Model

Abstract

We study the long- and short-term effects of telecommuting (TLC), staggered work hours (SWH), and their combined scheme on peak-period congestion and location patterns. In order to enable a unified comparison of the schemes’ long- and short-term effects, we develop a novel equilibrium analysis approach that consistently synthesizes the long-term equilibrium (location and percentage of telecommuting choice) and short-term equilibrium (preferred arrival time and departure time choice). By exploiting their special mathematical structures similar to optimal transport problems, we derive the closed-form solution to the long- and short-term equilibrium while explicitly considering their interaction. These closed-form solutions elucidate the discrepancies between the effects of each scheme and uncover a paradoxical finding: the introduction of SWH, in conjunction with TLC, may increase the total commuting costs compared with the scenario with only TLC, without yielding any improvement in worker utility. History: This paper has been accepted for the Transportation Science Special Issue on ISTTT25 Conference. Funding: This work was supported by Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (CSTI), Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP), the 3rd period of SIP “Smart Infrastructure Management System” [Grant JPJ012187] (Funding agency: PublicWorks Research Institute, Japan). This work was also supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI [Grants JP20J21744, JP21H01448, JP24K00999, JP20K14843, and JP23K13418] and the Support Program for Urban Studies of the Obayashi Foundation. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2024.0520 .