Research Agendas for Profitable Invasive Species

Applied economics often relies on research findings from other fields. With absent, inconclusive or contradictory findings, economics must interpret the uncertainty and ground any policy recom-mendations in this context. Understanding biases in the primary research agendas can assist in improving policy. Research and management are considered part of the production chain needed to manage the sustainable output of the ecosystem. We identify how economic incentives may systematically vary across research interests that feed into policy decisions over natural resource management of a simultaneously profitable and invasive species. We empirically test how this variation in incentives might affect research agendas and their findings for the case of the ongoing Red King Crab invasion in the Barents Sea. We find that research agendas may shift over time in response to shifts in the relative trade-offs between the financial resource benefit and the ecological consequences of the invasion as it progresses from introduction to establishment. Scientific con-sensus may be more difficult to achieve even for primary research when economic incentives differ across participating researchers.