The Blue Whiting Coalition Game

The current paper is an application of the analysis of coalition, in particular the partition function approach, to the North East Atlantic blue whiting fishery. In an Exclusive Membership/Coalition Unanimity game, a multiagent, age-structured bioeconomic model simulates the behaviour of the agents in a setting where we allow for partial cooperation between the coastal states consisting of the European Union (EU), the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Norway. We find that in a game played by the Exclusive Membership rules a coalition among all the coastal states is unstable, and cannot be a Nash equilibrium. Therefore, a coastal state agreement seems an unlikely outcome. However, under the more restricted Coalition Unanimity rules, fewer coalition structures are feasible, and the coastal state coalition becomes stable and the noncooperative coalition structure unstable.