Behavioral Response to Stock Abundance in Exploiting Common-Pool Resources : The Fishery

Fisheries management must manage people in order to manage fish. In this sense, understanding fishing behavior is the cornerstone of effective fisheries policy. However, the latency of fish stocks is a major obstacle in empirical studies. This paper addresses this challenge by deriving a stock index from a heterogeneous production function. We use the imputed stock proxy in a count data model that describes fishing trip frequency, which is an indicator of anthropogenic fishing pressure. In the empirical study of the reef-fish fishery in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico, we find that the popular method that uses catch rate as a stock proxy significantly underestimates fishermen's responses to stock changes. This result suggests that policy predictions based on the traditional method are overly optimistic