This paper analyses some of the organisational aspects of urban solid waste collection. It starts by discussing some of the theoretical issues of contracting out. Then, an explanatory model is specified and estimated on a sample of surveyed municipalities. The purpose is twofold: first, to identify the role of some economic factors when deciding to contract out the service; secondly, to analyse the role of politics in choosing between public production and contracting out. The results show a significant effect of the demand of waste collection on contracting out. There also appears to be a neighbouring effect as municipalities close to others already contracting out are also more prone to do so. Finally, the decisions to contract out seem to have been motivated by pragmatic rather than ideological reasons.
We propose a pseudo-market mechanism for no-monetary-transfer allocation of indivisible objects based on priorities such as those in school choice. Agents are given token money, face priority-specific prices, and buy utility-maximizing random assignments. The mechanism is asymptotically incentive compatible, and the resulting assignments are fair and constrained Pareto efficient. Hylland and Zeckhauser’s (1979) position-allocation problem is a special case of our framework, and our results on incentives and fairness are also new in their classical setting. (JEL D63, D82, H75, I21, I28)
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