Influence of Fishermen's Preferences on the Success of Commercial Fishery Management Regimes
- 1 April 1985
- journal article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in North American Journal of Fisheries Management
- Vol. 5 (2A) , 173-180
- https://doi.org/10.1577/1548-8659(1985)5<173:iofpot>2.0.co;2
Abstract
Fishermen may opt for goals of stock rebuilding and stable yield when fish stocks are depleted and the short term outlook for catches is poor but reject these goals when a good year class appears. The purpose of this study was to determine whether this apparent ambivalence among fishermen is a consequence of changing preference for short and long term returns or can be accounted for by the change in short term pay‐off associated with good recruitment. I derived realistic short and long term pay‐offs by exploiting a population model of the Gulf of Maine herring (Clupea hareugus) stock under two regimes. The goal of one regime was to obtain long term stable yields while the goal of the other was to take windfall yields from occasional good year classes. I used a multi‐attribute utility model to determine if there was a set of preference weights for short and long term returns that would cause fishermen logically to choose the stable yield regime when the short term outlook was poor but to choose the windfall yield regime when the short term outlook was good. Such a set of prerence weights did exist. If attributes other than short and long term returns were included in the analysis, then ambivalence was logically possible regardless of the weight assigned to these other attributes—provided the other attributes scored higher in the windfall yield regime but not if they scored higher in the stable yield regime. These results suggested that more acceptable management regimes could be designed based on a knowledge of fishermen's preferences.This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: