Voluntary Management of Fisheries under an Uncertain Background Legislative Threat

We investigate the possibility for governance authorities to avoid a large part of regulatory costs, by simply backing up social norms with a threat of collective punishment. Specifically, we consider the case of fisheries in which the regulatory cap is to sustain an optimal conservation level. We identify a mandatory regulation such that, when it is used as a threat, it ensures that the cap is voluntarily implemented. The mandatory scheme is based on a incentive mechanism which secures the returns of the harvester, and a tax on potential capacity. From the status of mere threat, this mandatory regulation takes time to be enforced though. We show that such a tax scheme, even if it is applied randomly after the first occurrence of a deviation from the optimal conservation level, ensures voluntary compliance, provided a suitable choice of the capacity tax. We study the properties of this tax scheme and build an example using data on the scallop fishery in the Saint-Brieuc Bay (France) to illustrate our point.