The Telecommuting Adoption Process : Conceptual Framework and Model Development

The substitution of travel by telecommunications has long been advocated as an approach that might alleviate congestion on transportation facilities. Among the variety of telecommunications applications such as telecommuting, teleshopping, and teleconferencing, telecommuting is considered one of the most promising substitutes of work trips, the major determinants of traffic congestion and air pollution during peak hours. Although positive effects from telecommuting have been demonstrated through small-scale pilot projects in the U.S.A .. , systematic research is still limited. The aim of this report is to propose a comprehensive framework of the interactions between telecommuting and travel behavior, and to develop a mathematical model of the telecommuting adoption process. The framework identifies two principal actors in the decision process (the employee and the employer), and the dynamic interactions between telecommuting and its environment. The employee faces a decision of whether to participate in a telecommuting program at work, given the program features and his/her personal and household characteristics and circumstances. The employer decides whether to offer a telecommuting program to his/her employees and the features of such a program, given the organization's mission and activities and the executives' management concerns. Discrete choice models are employed to formulate the adoption processes of both the employee and the employer. The derived choice models are based on the ordered-response theory and the normality assumptions of the disturbances, known as the ordinal probit model. While existing ordinal probit models are limited by their assumptions of deterministic utility thresholds and identical and independent disturbances of the latent variable, the generalized ordinal probit model derived in this research allows stochastic thresholds and a general variance covariance structure of the disturbances, which enables the model to analyze panel data with serial correlations or autocorrelations. In addition, model estimation procedures are implemented by a newly developed computer code that is based on a monte carlo simulation approach and the properties of truncated distribution. The empirical data are obtained from a survey in three cities. Stated preferences for telecommuting are elicited from both employees and employers for various telecommuting program scenarios. To address the possible auto-correlations existing among responses for the same individual, a general error structure is also specified in the choice model. The estimated results indicate that both the employee and the employer adoption processes are affected by their