Rent Dissipation in Chartered Recreational Fishing: Inside the Black Box

Note that anglers’ marginal willingness-to-pay for a day at sea is not only dependent
upon the quantity of charter services previously consumed, but also upon the quality of these
services. Quality may be a function of the daily catch rate, the chosen or imposed quantity of
landings, and the non-catch aspects of trip quality, which include aspects of the trip such as the
perceived safety and general upkeep of the vessel and the devotion of labor time toward non-
catch related activities that enhance the experience of fishing (such as serving food or drink to
passengers or filleting catch).⁷ This formulation mimics that of previous authors (c.f. Anderson,
1993, Woodward and Griffin, 2003) who have posited that both catch and landings are important
determinants of angler demand, but also embraces the findings of a wider social science
literature that finds non-catch aspects figure significantly as well (Arlinghaus, 2006, Ditton and
Gill, 1991, Fedler and Ditton, 1986). We assume the marginal benefit function is continuous and
twice-differentiable with respect to all variables and satisfies the following properties:

MB_D <0, MB_H >0, MB_S >0, MB_L(D,H,0,S) >0, MB_jj <0 j = H,S,L        (1)

where subscripts indicate the first partial derivative with respect to the subscripted variable. The
first condition simply assumes the demand function for charter trips is downward sloping
whereas the second and third state that the marginal willingness-to-pay for another day of fishing
is strictly increasing in the quality aspects of the trip. We do relax these assumptions for the
effects of landings, however, since it is plausible that, conditional upon the quantity of catch,
individuals may face satiation. Accordingly, we make the minimal assumption that positive
landings are a good for at least the first marginal unit of consumption.⁸ The final condition

⁷ Our assumption of identical preferences over catch, landings and non-catch quality can be easily relaxed by the
introduction of a range of demand functions for various angler “types”.

⁸ This assumption precludes preferences for pure catch and release fishing. In this case, consumptive use of catch is
no longer a good and so landings would fall out of the model.

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