Fishermen’s Compliance: A Dynamic Model

In this paper, a dynamic model of fishermen's compliance is developed and used to analyse several issues. There are two parties involved in the fishery; the regulator and the fishermen. The regulator takes on a long term view and sets the total quota at the beginning of every period in order to keep the stock at a predetermined level. Fishermen act on a period by period basis, seeking to maximise welfare within every period. In addition to buying a quota and legally harvest the quota quantity, they have the possibility to harvest illegally in excess of quotas. I introduce non-monetary moral costs of illegal harvesting that varies across the population of fishermen and is also affected by a social norm of compliance. The first part of the paper analyse optimal fisherman behaviour in terms of compliance and quota purchase. In the second part, I use these results to analyse the dynamics of the fishery.