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

TL;DR

This paper develops a unified equilibrium analysis to compare long- and short-term effects of telecommuting and staggered work hours, revealing a paradox where combined schemes can increase costs without improving worker utility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel equilibrium analysis method that synthesizes long- and short-term effects, providing explicit solutions and uncovering counterintuitive interactions between telecommuting and staggered hours.

Findings

Staggered work hours combined with telecommuting can increase total commuting costs.

The analysis reveals a paradox where combined schemes do not improve worker utility.

Closed-form solutions clarify the interaction effects between schemes.

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 to the scenario with only TLC, without yielding any improvement in worker utility.