sufficiently small to be negligible for the purposes of stock management. However, it has
become increasingly clear that recreational fish mortality, far from being insignificant, is often
comparable to or greater than the commercial mortality for many species.2 With fisheries
managers scrambling to find solutions for the effective control of recreational mortality,
economists have entered the policy arena promoting innovative rights-based policy prescriptions
that are grounded in the past successes of economic prescriptions for the management of
commercial fisheries but with allowances for the unique informational and transactions costs
associated with the recreational case (Johnston, et al., 2007, Sutinen and Johnston, 2003).
Despite the possible merits of these proposals, there is nevertheless a sense that they may
not be as immediately transferable to recreational settings as initially imagined. In the first
place, our understanding of the mechanisms of the rent dissipation process under open access is
imperfect at best. Experience from the rationalization of commercial fisheries has yielded many
surprises that demonstrate the inadequacies of simple single-factor (i.e. effort) models in
capturing the complexities of real-world rent dissipation (Wilen, 2005). Second, while the
recreational for-hire sector may seem similar to commercial fisheries operations in many ways,
there are key differences that may limit the simple transfer of knowledge and experience from
commercial rationalization programs. These observations point toward the need for a more
specialized theoretical foundation in order to predict the likely impacts of recreational fishery
rationalization programs.
2 A recent study suggests that 23% of the landings of “populations of concern” (those that are either overfished or
experiencing overfishing) are accounted for by recreational harvest (Coleman, et al., 2004). This proportion exhibits
significant regional variation - rising to 64% in the Gulf of Mexico.