EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Vessel buybacks in fisheries: The role of auction and financing structures

Joshua Graff Zivin and Jamie Mullins

Marine Policy, 2015, vol. 53, issue C, 188-197

Abstract: Vessel buyback programs intended to address overcapacity and excess capitalization in fisheries can lead to dramatically different levels of decapitalization depending on program structure and availability of vessel-specific information. This paper develops a simple theoretical model of self-financing vessel buybacks to examine equilibrium outcomes using sequential versus take-it-or-leave-it auctions, and financing schemes which allocate costs either homogeneously or according to rents captured through the buyback. This model demonstrates that programs which spread costs evenly among remaining vessels limit the possible extent of buybacks, as do programs which buy vessels one at a time in sequence rather than all at once. In addition to the theoretical modeling, a stylized case study inspired by the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Fishery is also provided. This analysis suggests that a wide range of auction structures could roughly half the size of the existing fleet, and starkly demonstrates how information poor settings can entirely derail a buyback.

Keywords: Fisheries policy; Common pool; Buyback programs; Self-financing; Capacity reduction; Decommissioning schemes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 Q22 Q28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X14002668
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:marpol:v:53:y:2015:i:c:p:188-197

DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2014.10.004

Access Statistics for this article

Marine Policy is currently edited by Eddie Brown

More articles in Marine Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-07
Handle: RePEc:eee:marpol:v:53:y:2015:i:c:p:188-197