The local bus market in Japan was deregulated in 2002. This study examines the impact of this deregulation on the market structure and the operators' cost efficiency over the last ten years. First, we perform a qualitative before-and-after-deregulation analysis of Japan's bus market, finding...

The damping theory is correctly applied to the coupled systems in contact with respective reservoirs. Differences between the present rigorous treatment of the damping theory and the conventional one are explicitly shown for an exactly solvable model of the parametric amplifier. The deviation...