Exploitation of a Mobile Resource with Costly Cooperation

Localized rights to common pool resources such as territorial use rights fisheries are a widely used class of management tools. However, the effectiveness of different designs of localized rights remains relatively unexplored, especially when one considers strategic interactions within and across patches in a metapopulation. Using a conceptual model of a system of localized fishing rights over each patch, we demonstrate how the interplay between the spatial distribution of rights and biological and strategic spillovers map into outcomes. Specifically, we show how accounting for endogenous costs to cooperative exploitation within a patch alters the conclusions derived from models that assume sole ownership within each patch. Moreover, we demonstrate how strategic interactions between patches can cause the costs to cooperative exploitation in any given patch to increase. These results highlight the complex political-economy dimensions that are important to consider in the design and evaluation of localized property rights in fisheries governance and elsewhere.