Market Information and Fisheries Management: A Multiple-Objective Analysis

Abstract

Market issues are often critical to the regional and national benefits that can be generated from fisheries management. In actual policy analysis, however, market considerations are often treated as exogenous to the fisheries policy problem. Examples illustrate the relationships between product characteristics, market demand, and regulatory management. A multiple‐objective socioeconomic policy model was formulated to demonstrate these relationships. Numerical analysis illustrated how price differences due to product quality characteristics affect the selection of regulatory controls and the attainment of policy objectives. Results demonstrated that selection of regulatory instruments, including allowable effort and mesh size, will vary depending on size‐related price differences and the relative values on noncomplementary objectives such as profits and employment. Results also showed that dynamic harvest patterns for each age‐class display greater differences across scenarios relative to stock size and stock composition. For the scenario where product quality and price are functions of season length, socioeconomic information was summarized in the form of policy frontiers. These frontiers demonstrate the intertemporal and capitalized trade‐offs between profits, employment, and stock size. This approach has potential for use, with some limitations, within the fisheries policy‐making process.

Concepts in fisheries management: Interdisciplinary gestalts and socioeconomic policy models

“…The variation in solutions may be compared to Sylvia (1991) when harvest size was not constrained across the four solutions. In that case the controls, objectives, and stock levels demonstrate considerably wider variation.…”

“…These utility functions are then used to select an optimal set of policy solutions. This type of approach, however, works best when the policy process is relatively orderly and involves few decision makers or policy actors (Sylvia, 1991)-for example, a policy process that relies primarily on the decisions and consensus of only a few scientific managers (see Boutillier et al, 1988 In contrast, fisheries policy under the FCMA relies not only on scientific management but also on a pluralistic process involving bargaining by multitudes of disparate policy actors outside the corridors of bureaucratic management.…”

“…A numerical model (from Sylvia, 1991) can be used to illustrate these issues. In its original application the objective was to demonstrate how market information could influence selection of regulatory instruments and development of policy frontiers.…”

“…Conceptually, there really is no level of yield that is optimal for the management problem; rather, there is a level of yield that is realized in maximizing some set of society's goals. If any feature of the problem changes, including the social objectives or the set of regulatory choices, then the actual yield that is "optimal" would also change (see Sylvia, 1991, for an example when yield is not constrained to MSY). In fact, in a true multiobjective analysis where alternative relative values can be applied to sets of social goals, a practically infinite number of "optimal" yields can be generated, all of them justifiable under the general guidelines of the FCMA."…”

A Decision Support Model for Fisheries Management in Hawaii: A Multilevel and Multiobjective Programming Approach

“…Moreover, it provides a particularly useful methodology to study distributive and operational issues facing fisheries management (Gunn et al 1991). The mathematical programming technique has been applied to fisheries modeling and has addressed such issues as effort allocation, fishery industry structure, regulation scheme and impact, and harvest strategy for decades (Rothschild and Balsiger 1971;Anderson et al 1981;Shepherd and Garrod 1981;Ahmed 1992;Sylvia 1994;Herrick et al 1997).…”