Economic Perspective and the Evolution of Fisheries Management: Towards Subjectivist Methodology

Some perspectives of neo-institutional economics are used to reexamine the common pool fishery. Applications of properly rights theory in models simulating the evolution of fisheries management suggest that even in the presence of positive information and transactions costs (ITCs), resource users may have incentives to sequentially negotiate rules of common pool use. Such a result might imply that fisheries managers should he more concernedwith ITCs than inefficiencies due to overcapitalization. This impression is further reinforced in collective choice examples taken from U.S. fisheries management. These comparative cases of public decision making in New Englandand Alaska suggest that variations in the style of public management as wellas other aspects such as fleet heterogeneity might cause variations in management effectiveness. These variations in effectiveness may be related to theITC environment internal to the public agencies, as well as to the external ITCenvironment they face.