Fisheries Management in Congested Waters: A Game-Theoretic Assessment of the East China Sea

Michael Perry ()
Additional contact information
Michael Perry: George Mason University

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2022, vol. 82, issue 3, No 8, 717-740

Abstract: Abstract Fisheries in the East China Sea (ECS) face multiple concerning trends. Aside from depleted stocks caused by overfishing, illegal encroachments by fishermen from one nation into another’s legal waters are a common occurrence. This behavior presumably could be stopped via strong monitoring, controls, and surveillance (MCS), but MCS is routinely rated as below standards for nations bordering the ECS. This paper generalizes the ECS to a model of a congested maritime environment, defined as an environment where multiple nations can fish in the same waters with equivalent operating costs, and uses game-theoretic analysis to explain why the observed behavior persists in the ECS. The paper finds that nations in congested environments are incentivized to issue excessive quotas, which in turn tacitly encourages illegal fishing and extracts illegal rent from another’s legal waters. This behavior couldn’t persist in the face of strong MCS measures, and states are thus likewise incentivized to use poor MCS. A bargaining problem is analyzed to complement the noncooperative game, and a key finding is the nation with lower nonoperating costs has great leverage during the bargain.

Keywords: Fishing disputes; Fisheries management; Game theory; Illegal fishing; Maritime law enforcement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10640-022-00688-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:kap:enreec:v:82:y:2022:i:3:d:10.1007_s10640-022-00688-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10640/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10640-022-00688-9

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental & Resource Economics is currently edited by Ian J. Bateman

More articles in Environmental & Resource Economics from Springer, European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().