Rent-Seeking and Incentives for Compliance in the Commons

Jorge Holzer, Douglas Lipton and Olivier François

American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2013, vol. 95, issue 1, 117-130

Abstract: This article studies how rent-seeking behavior induces an informal leasing market for fishing licenses that leads harvesters in a common pool to circumvent rules set by the manager to conserve the resource, as well as how the vulnerability of the resource to such behavior depends on the management approach adopted. License leasing reduces fleet heterogeneity in terms of catch per unit effort as demonstrated by the outward shift in the stochastic production frontier. While aggregate harvest is invariant to alternative profiles of fleet heterogeneity in quota-managed fisheries, the productivity of the restricted variable--total effort--increases with the number of leasing contracts in input-controlled fisheries. If unanticipated by the regulator, the additional pressure on the resource may lead to overfishing and compromise the long-term viability of the industry. Copyright 2013, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ajae/aas077 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:ajagec:v:95:y:2013:i:1:p:117-130

Access Statistics for this article

American Journal of Agricultural Economics is currently edited by Madhu Khanna, Brian E. Roe, James Vercammen and JunJie Wu

More articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().