Analysis of a highly migratory fish stocks fishery: A game theoretic approach

This paper develops a two period noncooperative game-theoretic model of a Highly Migratory Fish Stocks (HMFS) fishery. In each period, the fish stock migrates from the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of a coastal state into the high seas, where distant water fishing (DWF) harvesters may harvest. We show that having an EEZ improves total welfare by reducing total harvest and that the degree of the welfare improvement increases when the number of harvesters in an HMFS fishery increases. We also show that an increase in the number of DWF harvesters leads to a larger harvest and rent dissipation. With open-access in the second stage, resource rent is totally dissipated for DWF harvesters, but not for the coastal state harvesters, which still earn positive rent.