Property Rights And The Management Of Multiple Use Fisheries

Arguments in favor of adopting rights-based management strategies have been developed primarily in the context of commercial fisheries and have focused on increasing the profitability of catcher vessel operations and reducing the incentive to deplete fish stocks. Relatively little attention has been given to the effects that alternative management regimes could have on the profitability of processing and support service businesses, consumer surplus, or to the interface between commercial fishing, sport fishing, and other use and nonuse demands for fishery resources. Although there is often congruence among users with respect to stock management and rule enforcement objectives, other objectives are mutually incompatible. This paper begins with a simple conceptual analysis of the effects of alternative regimes for management of a charterbased recreational fishery on the magnitude of net benefits in the sport fishery and in an associated commercial fishery. A theoretical framework for identifying the optimal commercial-sport allocation and the optimal sustainable yield is developed in the subsequent section. The final section reports the results of an empirically based comparative static simulation of commercial and charter-based sport fishing for halibut off Alaska.