In commercial fisheries, stock collapse is an intrinsic problem caused by overexploitation or due to pure stochasticity. To analyze the risk of stock collapse, we apply a relatively simple Monte Carlo approach which can capture complex stock dynamics. We use an economic model with downward...

Catastrophic risk is currently a hotly debated topic. This paper contributes to this debate by showing two results. First it shown that the value function in dynamic optimization can have an infinite derivative at some point even if the model specification has functional forms that are finite...

Renewable resources are affected by both environmental variability, which makes the year-to-year stock growth uncertain, and the risk of irreversible events (e.g., a stock collapse). Little is known about how a renewable resource harvester would optimally respond to the combined effects of both...

We study the impact of uncertainty on the strategies and dynamics of symmetric non-cooperative games among players who exploit a non-excludable resource that reproduces under uncertainty. We focus on a particular class of games that deliver a Nash equilibrium in linear-symmetric strategies of...

Individual transferable quotas (ITQs) in multispecies fisheries create incentives for fishermen to avoid bycatch of species for which quota is scarce. However, when bycatch is highly uncertain, individual quota demand and prices may be volatile creating substantial financial risk for fishermen....

Spatial management of a fishery under parameter uncertainty is analyzed. The habitat is divided into two areas, and the effort level in the two areas may be different. The migration of biomass between the areas follows a diffusion process; two different specifications are considered. The model...

We analyze the effect of environmental uncertainties on optimal fishery management in a bio-economic fishery model. Unlike most of the literature on resource economics, but in line with ecological models, we allow the different biological processes of survival and recruitment to be affected...

Risk of stock collapse is a genuine motivation for cooperative fisheries management. We analyse the effect of an endogenously determined risk of stock collapse on the incentives to cooperate in a Great Fish War model. We establish that equilibrium harvest strategies are non-linear in stock and...

Decisions involving risk are usually taken in the presence of other insurable or non-insurable risks, the latter type called background risk. We examine how changing background risk influences risk-taking based on panel data with monthly observations from Senegalese fishermen. Fishing income is...

Climate change is likely to trigger abrupt and potentially persistent changes in the structure and function of marine ecosystems. Such ‘regime shifts' threaten the livelihoods of millions of people reliant on small-scale fisheries. Yet, it is largely unknown how resource users cope with regime...