Eliminating Competition in Fisheries Management: The Mediterranean Case

In this paper, we introduce a simple regulation scheme that might counteract the inefficiencies caused by competition between vessels in fisheries. Each fishing firm is induced to solve the same problem as a social planner. With a constant price for fish, a monopoly firm having all fishing rights might select the Maximum Economic Yield (MEY) outcome in steady state while competition between many vessels will create a competitive game where the solution is a Nash equilibrium comparable to the open access solution. With few vessels the outcome has similarities to the classic Cournot-Nash equilibrium of oligopolistic competition.