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

由于COVID-19大流行而大大加速的远程工作实践可能会在大流行后的许多企业及其员工的工作和生活中发挥更大的作用。虽然远程工作对一些人来说有好处，但如果远程工作持续到很大程度，它可能会导致“空心化城镇”，即城市中心因缺乏办公室工作人员而严重下降。这一趋势使美国城市处于危险之中，并威胁到许多低收入服务工作者的生计，这些人依赖人们来城市核心工作、购物和开展业务。这种现象与大流行前形成鲜明对比，当时城市是创新和经济活动的中心，但也受到交通拥堵和车辆排放等负面外部性的影响。该项目将建立设计更理想的未来工作场景的能力，在这些场景中，熟练工人（即那些可以远程工作的人）的工作场所决策可以在公司之间进行协调，从而保持城市作为经济催化剂和创新中心的活力；当地企业和服务业蓬勃发展；交通拥堵也减少了。如果成功，这个“人类技术前沿工作的未来”（FW-HTF）规划拨款项目将通过帮助保留城市内部的服务工作岗位，创造机会对服务人员进行再培训，并帮助维持美国城市作为经济活力创新集群的长期声誉，同时减轻几十年来困扰城市中心的负面外部性，从而提高国民福祉。该项目有三个重点：1)进行初步分析，量化远程工作水平不断提高对当地经济和市中心服务人员的影响；2)开展探索性工作，了解企业对城市可能实施的优化员工存在的替代政策方案的反应；3)让利益相关者评估政策可行性，以及他们对使用技术优化员工在办公室的存在的态度和信任。该项目将重点关注西雅图和凤凰城，这两个城市的经济活动空间分布非常不同。通过利用行为经济学的知识，以及神经网络和进化规划的方法，将开发一个新的分层Stackelberg博弈框架，以模拟现实但不确定环境中的企业行为。城市中心可能空洞化的临界阈值和潜在的预警信号将被调查。该项目将为在运筹学、经济学、公共政策和交通的交叉领域产生新的方法和知识奠定基础。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.