Size-Targeting in the Bering Sea Pollock Catcher/Processor Fishery with Heterogeneous Incentives

We explore management of a common-pool resource with incomplete property rights, because standard weight-based harvest quotas employed in most regulated fisheries do not consider the size of fish harvested. To understand the effect of vessels’ asymmetric harvesting strategies, we empirically link revenue per unit of quota with the size of fish captured using a flexible, data-determined estimation technique to control for latent heterogeneity across individuals. As a case study, we investigate the US Bering Sea pollock fishery, where larger fish can enable the production of higher-value products, but some harvesters profitably choose to target smaller fish to decrease their own harvesting costs. In the process, these harvesters impose a stock externality on the fleet, which we demonstrate using a dynamic age-structured model. A manager who controls for the size of fish caught increases future catches and prices due to higher-value products, while reducing the risk of overfishing.