Voluntary Approaches to Transitioning from Competitive Fisheries to Rights-Based Management: Bringing the Field into the Lab

This paper describes a novel experiment designed to examine how rent dissipation may occur in fisheries in which the right to participate in the fishery is limited and fishermen compete amongst themselves for shares of an exogenous total allowable catch. We demonstrate that rent dissipation may occur through multiple mechanisms, and that the heterogeneity of fishermen has important implications for how rent dissipation occurs and the extent to which different individuals may benefit from the implementation of rights-based management. We apply this approach to investigate the concept of voluntary rights-based management under which managers divide the total allowable catch between two separate fisheries, and fishermen may choose between fishing for a guaranteed individual harvest quota or competing for a share of the total catch in a competitive fishery.