We first report three empirical findings from our survey on the contracting-out of municipal waste collection services in Japan: (1) the rate of contracting-out and the contract price are inversely related, (2) this inverse relationship tapers out as the contracting rate becomes sufficiently high, and the contract price even tends to go up as the contracting rate approaches 100% and (3) there is a significant disparity in the contracting rates between the eastern and western parts of Japan. In order to account for these observations, we then set up a simple analytical model and examine its implications. Also, we discuss the issues that a potential hold-up situation could give rise to when the services are completely contracted out to private firms.

In the last decade, there has been a growing concern in Japan about the proper use of resources related to emergency medical services, including ambulances. This letter proposes two new methods to optimize the ambulance deployment using a dynamic model, which precisely represents the sequential decision-making process of ambulances dispatched to each request. These methods give allocations to minimize the arrival times in all requests but differ in formulating objectives: one minimizes the average, and the other minimizes the maximum. A computer simulation is used to compare the performances of the two methods in terms of efficiency and fairness.