Fish Abundance Information and Fishery's Aggregate Behavior

Philippe Marcoul ()

Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 2020, vol. 7, issue 5, 933 - 964

Abstract: We analyze a competitive fishery with congestion in which each skipper is privately informed about fish abundance, and we study the broader implications for the entire fishery. Harvest strategies are shown to depend on congestion, the number of vessels, fishers' prior information, and the precision of their signal. As information signals are valuable, fishers have incentives to share them despite congestion costs. Yet, this cooperative behavior tends to increase aggregate harvests but also makes it harder for fishery managers to predict harvests. The existence of information sharing (IS) is not independent of the existing policy framework, and new policy measures aimed at reducing harvests can trigger IS and, ultimately, result in higher fish mortality. The strategic release by the manager of abundance information changes fishing effort and, hence, can become a policy tool through which harvests can be lowered. Finally, we investigate the implications of having several IS groups.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/709812 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/709812 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:jaerec:doi:10.1086/709812

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().