Bottleneck congestion and distribution of work start times: The economics of staggered work hours revisited

Abstract

Since the seminal work of Henderson (1981), a number of studies examined the effect of staggered work hours by analyzing models of work start time choice that consider the trade-off between negative congestion externalities and positive production externalities. However, these studies described traffic congestion using flow congestion models. This study develops a model of work start time choice with bottleneck congestion and discloses the intrinsic properties of the model. To this end, this study extends Henderson's model to incorporate bottleneck congestion. By utilizing the properties of a potential game, we characterize equilibrium and optimal distributions of work start times. We also show that Pigouvian tax/subsidy policies generally yield multiple equilibria and that the first-best optimum must be a stable equilibrium under Pigouvian policies, whereas the secondbest optimum in which policymakers cannot eliminate queuing congestion can be unstable.JEL classification: C62; C72; C73; D62; R41; R48

Bottleneck congestion and residential location of heterogeneous commuters

“…We need to examine the robustness of our result by analyzing a model with multiple bottlenecks. 9 In addition, it would be valuable for future research to investigate effects of policies other than congestion tolling, such as step tolls (Arnott et al, 1990a;Laih, 1994Laih, , 2004Lindsey et al, 2012) and transportation demand management measures for alleviating traffic congestion (Mun and Yonekawa, 2006;Takayama, 2015).…”

“…Similar to models in Peer and Verhoef (2013), Gubins and Verhoef (2014), and Takayama (2015), we assume that commuters make long-run decisions about residential locations and short-run decisions about day-specific trip timing. In the short run, commuters i minimize commuting cost c i (x, t) by selecting their arrival time t at work (trip timing t) taking their residential location x as given.…”

Modeling and managing morning commute with both household and individual travels

“…It is worth mentioning that the efficiency of schedule coordination depends on relative proportions of the two classes of travelers, and can be bounded. Note that there is a branch of studies looking into staggered work hours (e.g., Henderson 1981;Yushimito et al, 2014;Shirmohammadi et al, 2015;Takayama, 2015). However, all of these studies focus on the coordination of work schedules for individuals.…”

A new look at the morning commute with household shared-ride: How does school location play a role?

“…More recently, Liu et al (2016) further extended Jia et al (2016) by looking into a more general situation with both shared-ride travellers (on home-school-work trips) and individual travellers (on home-work trips). In the similar spirit of staggered work hours (as those in Henderson, 1981;Yushimito et al, 2014;Takayama, 2015), Liu et al (2016) proposed to coordinate the schedules of school and work to reduce traffic congestion and travel cost of road users.…”