Endogenous Scheduling Preferences and Congestion

We seek to better understand the scheduling of activities in time through a dynamic model of commuting with congestion, in which workers care solely about leisure and consumption. Implicit preferences for the timing of the commute form endogenously due to concave preferences and temporal agglomeration economies. Equilibrium exists uniquely and is indistinguishable from that of a generalized version of the classical Vickrey bottleneck model, based on exogenous trip-timing preferences; but optimal policies differ: the Vickrey model will under-predict the benefits of congestion pricing, and such pricing may make people better off even without considering the use of revenues.