Fish Wars: Cooperative and Non-Cooperative Approaches

Mirman (1979) and Levhari and Mirman (1980) suggested a simple two person multistage game-theoretical model which sheds some light on the economic implications inherent in the fishing conflicts where the decisions of the competitors have an effect on the evolution of the fish population and so, on the future expected profit of the competitors. In this paper we consider a generalization of the Levhari and Mirman Fish War Game for the case of n participants of the conflict for different scenarios of hierarchical and coalition structures of countries. We derive the equilibrium and its steady-state behavior for all these scenarios and analyze the impact which the hierarchical and coalition structures can have on fishery and ecology.