Rent Dissipation in Chartered Recreational Fishing: Inside the Black Box
I. Introduction
A canvass of the resource economics literature of the last thirty years yields only a small
number of applications of economic theory to the problems of recreational fishing, especially
compared to the large number of contributions to commercial fisheries over this same era.1
McConnell and Sutinen (1979) pioneered the application of bioeconomic models in the
recreational context with a simple model in which angler demand was solely a function of the
quantity of trips and the harvest per trip . They show the existence of a stock externality in free
competition relative to the optimally managed system. Anderson (1993) expands upon this
framework by endogenizing the discard decisions of anglers and incorporating a mechanism for
entry and exit of potentially heterogeneous fishery participants. Bishop and Samples (1980)
consider the issue of allocation of species that are shared between commercial and recreational
fisheries. Homans and Ruliffson (1997) examine the implications of minimum size limits for
achieving management goals and improving fishing quality while Woodward and Griffin (2003)
take this analysis still further by considering the joint use of size and bag limits.
This neglect may be linked to the relatively short shrift given to the control of
recreational fisheries by fisheries managers in the past. Recreational fisheries for many species
have historically gone largely unchecked while commercial fleets targeting the same species (for
instance, the Gulf of Mexico red snapper fishery) have seen their ability to harvest the same
species dramatically curtailed. This asymmetry may be justified when recreational takes are
1 By contrast, the empirical economic literature on recreational fisheries is far too extensive to fully catalogue here
(c.f. Bockstael, et al. (1989), Criddle, et al. (2003), Gillig, et al. (2000, 2003), Haab, et al. (2000), Lee (2000)).
However, this literature has shared the focus of the broader recreation valuation literature (Phaneuf and Smith, 2005)
by focusing on welfare estimates of regional fisheries or the welfare impacts of changes in natural amenities.
Relatively little focus has been placed upon the empirical assessment of rent dissipation in open access systems or
the predictive modeling of demand in response to regulation, a notable exception being Scrogin, et al. (2004).