Community enforcement of fisheries effort restrictions

This paper models the use of community sanctions to restrict effort in a simple Gordon–Schaefer style model of the fishery with heterogeneous fishing costs. The withdrawal of cooperation in other areas of life is used to both restrict effort and to sanction those who continue to cooperate with those who have not restricted effort. Coalition-proof Nash equilibria are generated by a combination of sanctions discouraging the defection of small groups and stock reductions discouraging noncooperation by large groups. Both entry restrictions and individual quotas can be supported by community sanctions under some parameter combinations. However, there are cases where each can generate lower total rents than would be available under open access. Relatively low-cost fishers are more likely to support entry restrictions and ignore community attempts to restrict individual effort while high-cost fishers are more likely to support quotas.