Strategic Joint Production Under Common-Pool Output Quotas: The Case of Fisheries Bycatch

Joshua K. Abbott and James Wilen

No 21468, 2006 Annual meeting, July 23-26, Long Beach, CA from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association)

Abstract: We develop a simple game-theoretic model to explain the production decisions of firms when the production of a marketed good is complementary with the output of an associated good for which no market is available and the output of both goods is regulated by exogenously determined common pool output quotas. This scenario matches that of many fisheries in which regulators attempt to simultaneously manage harvests of targeted species and bycatch of other species through common pool quotas and seasonal closures. Under a competitive equilibrium, individual fishermen fail to fully account for the external effects of their harvest decisions on the season length, leading to excessive discards, drastically shortened seasons, and large shares of un-harvested quota for all but the smallest of fishery sizes. These results are robust for even very efficient (low-bycatch) fishing gears. We examine the sensitivity of our predictions to changes in output prices, discard costs, quota allocations and differing degrees of spatial correlation of target and bycatch species. Finally, we derive the optimal bycatch penalty function and describe its significance in light of various policy alternatives available to regulators.

Keywords: Resource/Energy; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/21468/files/sp06ab03.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:aaea06:21468

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.21468

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2006 Annual meeting, July 23-26, Long Beach, CA from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().