Economic insight into fish wars: Cooperation and conflicts in the management of shared fishery resources

This dissertation studies the management of sequential fisheries. The study provides policy recommendations and comparisons between existing regulations and the recommendations of economic theory. The first chapter investigates optimal management of the northern Baltic salmon fishery under the assumption that a single authority controls the fishery. The study provides a bioeconomic model of a sequential fishery that takes into account the simultaneous harvest of wild and reared fish. The study assesses the optimal harvest allocation between the commercial offshore, inshore, and estuary fisheries, and the recreational river fishery that sequentially harvest the salmon stock. The solution is restricted to spawning stocks sufficient to preserve the wild salmon. The study proposes a harvest allocation that substantially improves the economic performance of the fishery over the current regulatory system.; The second chapter addresses cooperative and non-cooperative harvesting in a sequential fishery characterized by stochastic fluctuations in stock recruitment. Two fleets, controlled by separate authorities, harvest in a stochastic interception fishery. Cooperative management is analyzed as a non-cooperative game, where deviations from cooperative harvesting are deterred by the threat of harvesting at non-cooperative levels for a fixed number of periods whenever the initial stock falls below a trigger level. An empirical example based on data for the northern Baltic salmon fishery illustrates the sequential harvesting game. Cooperative harvesting yields participants substantial gains in terms of expected payoffs. The greatest gains accrue to the fleet harvesting the spawning stock, the actions of which are not observed by the competitor. An explanation for the prevalence of fish wars is provided in that even if a cooperative agreement is reached, shocks in recruitment trigger phases of non-cooperative harvesting. Further, the cooperative solution can only be maintained when stock uncertainty is not too prevalent.; The third chapter provides an empirical analysis of regulation in the North Pacific halibut fishery, one of the fisheries with the longest regulatory history. The study investigates how the regulator's objectives comply with the economists' ideal of discounted rent maximization. Based on data for the halibut fishery, the study estimates the parameters of the objective function of a regulator who solves a stochastic dynamic optimization problem. The study uses the data based empirical likelihood technique suggested by Qin and Lawless (1994) and Mittelhammer, Judge, and Miller (2000), and compares the results to traditional method of moments estimates. The data based method readily lends itself to estimating stochastic Euler equations and problems where data are limited, prevalent in resource management problems.