Essays on fisheries management

This dissertation consists of three manuscripts that explore the present issues on both commercial and recreational fishery management in the United States of America. It reviews recent development and different management strategies in fisheries, which shows the need to expand and improve the present fishery management in order to entail sustainability of resources as well as the economic well-being of the fishery participants. The first manuscript is policy oriented and suggests a rights-based cooperative approach may provide an incentive for the rational management of Atlantic sea scallop fishery. Due to excessive harvest capability and regulatory inefficiencies, the sea scallop industry is facing substantial harvesting costs and hence, economic inefficiency. The main reason is that most regulations or restrictions do not take into account the fundamental importance of the property rights for inducing behavior more consonant with aggregate as well as individual rationality. This article conceptualizes the role and importance of property rights structures in their application to Atlantic sea scallop fishery management. The Manuscript 2 focuses on theoretical modeling of a recreational fishery, integrating heterogeneity in decision-making processes among recreational fishermen. This paper presents a random utility recreational demand model using a repeated nested logit approach incorporating the variation in preferences across anglers (i.e., heterogeneity). The paper provides a behavioral representation of anglers when they make decisions for fishing. This paper examines linkages between four dimensions of an angler\u27s decision-making, including travel behavior, activity participation, mode/site location, and species choices. The paper combines these four dimensions to form different anglers\u27 behaviors based on their objectives and goals. The third manuscript is based on an empirical analysis that examines the variation, level and determinants of technical efficiency within the Atlantic herring fishery fishing fleets. It is important to measure both on the variation and the level of technical efficiency within the fishing fleets in order to control overfishing. This study uses vessel-level data from selected principal gears usage in the Atlantic ocean in the United States of America (USA) for the purpose of gaining a better understanding of whether or not these herring fishery vessels operate in an efficient manner. This study estimates stochastic production frontier functions based on Cobb-Douglas and translog functional forms for both cross-sectional and panel data in period 2000–2002. (Abstract shortened by UMI.