The Conservation of Trans-National Marine Fish Stocks: A Game-Theoretic Analysis

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Page 1 Date JUN 25 97 Abstract for Proposal/Award DBI-9708475 PI NAME: McKelvey International treaties for achieving conservation and sustainable harvest of the world's marine fish stocks have proved to be elusive and unstable. Astonishingly violent "fish wars" have erupted, leaving cooperative arrangements in disarray, fishing communities economically depressed, and fish stocks at risk of collapse. This project is designed to reexamine, in the light of modern game-theoretic concepts, the core reasons for this instability of cooperative management, and to identify new institutional arrangements which might prove to be more stable. The work proposed involves formulation and analysis of game-theoretic models of a bi- national jointly managed ``shared'' fishery, where the stocks are harvested sequentially as they migrate across national boundaries. The models are necessarily dynamic, since strategic interactions are conditioned by past performance, as well as by projected future circumstances. Emphasis is placed on pervasive uncertainty and the role of incomplete information that is common in decision making. Specific issues to be studied are: 1)institutional incentives which have led to over-investment in fleets and processing facilities; 2) tradeoffs between long term goals of conservation and sustainability and short term goals of socioeconomic stability; 3) strategic interactions, conditioned by the particular ecological structure of the ecological community of harvested fish species; and 4) the design of institutional arrangements which can promote stable cooperative joint management of a marine fishery in uncertain and unanticipated circumstances. Funding for this project is provided by the programs of Computational Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in MPS, and by the Computational Biology Activity in BIO.