Rent Dissipation in Chartered Recreational Fishing: Inside the Black Box

marginal signal to fishermen in terms of the implicit tax on fishing days, it would fail to provide
an effective check on their landings behavior since it is determined on an ex-ante basis. In the
end, we would expect an equilibrium where landings exceed the level predicted by the optimal
management model as well as a greater number of days at sea than prescribed under optimal
management since demand would be shifted to the right relative to a scenario where landings are
effectively constrained.

A second rationale for the direct imposition of landings fees on anglers is that it is robust
to angler heterogeneity in landings preferences. Although we presumed identical preferences in
our previous derivations, the results are easily generalized to allow for angler heterogeneity in a
number of factors, including preferences for retaining catch and exogenous skill in capturing
fish. It is simple to demonstrate that as long as this heterogeneity is accounted for in the
derivation ofλ_SS , the tax or quota system derived above allows each angler to retain catch
according to their particular preferences while still doing so in an optimal matter.³² “High
retention” types retain a greater proportion of their catch than do “catch and release” types yet
everyone pays the full social cost of the resulting mortality. Barring the existence of a perfect
pass-through market for landings on vessels, the imposition of a landings penalty on vessel
owners is unlikely to generate such an efficient distribution of landings across anglers. For
instance, in an attempt to moderate expenditures on landings fees, vessels may establish blanket
landings standards for all passengers. Such a system, while easy to monitor and enforce, will
likely generate considerable inefficiencies and distributional issues by doing little to constrain

³² This does not imply that regulators must perfectly observe individual heterogeneity; rather, they must possess
knowledge of the distribution of heterogeneity in the population of anglers.

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