Conflict and cooperation in an age structured fishery

Abstract

The literature on ‘fish wars', where agents engage in non-cooperative exploitation of single fish stocks or interacting fish stocks is well established, but age and stage structured models do not seem to have been handled within this literature. In this paper we study a game where two agents, or fishing fleets, compete for the same fish stock, which is divided into two harvestable age classes. The situation modelled here may be representative for many fisheries, such as the Norwegian North Atlantic cod fishery where the coastal fleet targets old mature fish while the trawler fleet targets young mature fish. We analyze the game under different assumptions about the underlying information available to each fleet and the actions of the agents. The outcomes of the games are compared to the optimal cooperative solution. The paper provides several results, which differ in many respects from what are found in biomass models. The analysis is supported by numerical examples.