FW-HTF-P/Collaborative Research: Designing a Market-based Optimization Tool for the Future of Work: Balancing Remote Work and Community Vitality in Post-COVID American Cities

Remote work practices, which have been greatly accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will likely play an increased role in post-pandemic work and life for many businesses and their employees. While there are benefits to remote work for some, if remote work persists to a significant degree, it may lead to "hollow towns" wherein city centers experience a serious decline in the absence of office workers. This trend is placing American cities in peril and threatening the livelihoods of many lower-income service workers who depend on people's coming to the city core to work, shop, and conduct business. This phenomenon is in stark contrast to the pre-pandemic era when cities served as hubs of innovation and economic activities, but also suffered from negative externalities such as traffic congestion and vehicular emissions. This project will build capacity toward designing more desirable future of work scenarios where workplace decisions by skilled workers, i.e., those who can work remotely, can be coordinated across firms in such a manner that the vibrancy of the city as an economic catalyst and an innovation hub is maintained; local businesses and service workers thrive; and traffic congestion is reduced. If successful, this Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier (FW-HTF) Planning Grant project will advance the national well-being by helping to retain inner-city service jobs, generate opportunities to re-train service workers, and help maintain American cities' long-standing reputation as economically vibrant clusters of innovation, while mitigating the negative externalities that have plagued city centers for decades.

The project has three thrusts: 1) conduct preliminary analyses to quantify the impacts of increasing levels of remote work on local economy and inner-city service workers; 2) perform exploratory work to understand firms' responses to alternative policy options that cities may implement to optimize worker presence; and 3) engage stakeholders to assess policy feasibility and their attitudes towards and trust in using technologies to optimize worker presence in offices. The project will focus on Seattle and Phoenix, two cities with very different spatial distributions of economic activities. A novel hierarchical Stackelberg game framework will be developed by leveraging knowledge from behavioral economics, as well as methods in neural networks and evolutionary programming, to model firm behavior in a realistic but uncertain environment. Critical thresholds at which city centers may hollow out and potential early warning signals will be investigated. The project will lay the groundwork in generating new methods and knowledge at the intersection of operations research, economics, public policy, and transportation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.