landings are likely constrained by harvest so that only landing rights need to be traded
(regardless of the mortality of discards for the species). These are fortunate situations from a
management perspective because measuring landings at the dock is always easier than
attempting to measure at sea discards. However, as discard mortality increases, so does the user
cost of discards and so managers must increasingly focus their efforts on curtailing discards.
This is especially important where a fish is primarily targeted for sport so that landings represent
only small portion of total mortality. This is a very problematic situation that poses monitoring,
measurement and enforcement difficulties that are yet to be solved in many long-standing
commercial fisheries with significant discard mortality.
Although we have focused our attention on theoretically optimal policies in this paper,
our framework is nevertheless quite useful in addressing the strengths and shortcomings of more
limited and cost-conscious rationalization policies. For example, in lieu of the three-part tax (or
quota) we have prescribed above, regulators could instead fix total angler days and allow vessel
owners to purchase the rights to service these angler days in a quota market.39 Such an approach
is easily monitored and enforced and derives some clout from the first condition in (29) that
shows how a properly calculated quota is capable of providing efficient incentives for anglers in
determining the extensive margin of their fishing mortality. However, when applied exclusively
without regard to the discards or landings associated with individual trips (the intensive margins
of mortality), this policy will induce numerous slippages in per-angler landings, catch-
augmenting and (possibly) quality-augmenting inputs, anglers per vessel and the equilibrium
fleet size. The message of our modeling is that there are multiple margins across which rents
may be dissipated in recreational fisheries. When a policy is targeted at only a subset of these
39 Such a scheme is not a theoretical curiosity. A similar scheme has been in place in the New England commercial
groundfish fisheries for several years to control fishing mortality after other methods were attempted and judged as
failures.
36