Record Details
A Simple Buy-back Auction for Fisheries Management
ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Title | A Simple Buy-back Auction for Fisheries Management |
| Names |
Ledyard, John
(creator) Groves, Ted (creator) |
| Date Issued | 2014-07-07 (iso8601) |
| Note | presentation |
| Abstract | In an open fishery, the competition for the limited fish stock can lead fishermen to a ``race for fish" with sub-optimally high capital investments. Buyback programs to reduce excess capacity in national fisheries have been often used, but seldom successful. Where they have successfully reduced excess capacity, the programs have come at a high cost, almost always in the form of governmental subsidies to buy out the excess capacity. These subsidies may even exceed the full gain in social surplus from the fishery that is, after all, the main purpose of the programs. While, in principle, the presence of excess capacity implies there are Pareto-improving allocations of fishing rights, which involve the removal of the highest cost or least efficient vessel capacity from the industry, the difficulty is in identifying the least efficient vessels and providing the incentives for their owners to be voluntarily bought out by the owners of vessels remaining in the fishery. Our paper explores, from a mechanism-design approach, the possibilities for and limits of buyback programs - specifically auctions - that are entirely self-financed Our main results delimit conditions on the fishery that allow an efficient, self-financed (i.e. requiring no outside subsidies) auction design that will also satisfy voluntary participation (i.e. all a priori identified vessel owners will choose to participate in the auction.) |
| Genre | Presentation |
| Topic | Fisheries Economics |
| Identifier | Ledyard, John and T. Groves. 2014. A Simple Buy-back Auction for Fisheries Management. In: Towards ecosystem based management of fisheries: what role can economics play?: Proceedings of the Seventeenth Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade, July 7-11, 2014, Brisbane, Australia. Complied by Ann L. Shriver & Melissa Errend. Corvallis, OR: International Institute of Fisheries. |
