Fishing for Knowledge

Abstract

Although it may come as a surprise to persons unacquainted with fisheries economics, traditional theory assumes away the problem of finding fish.' The point of this paper is to begin the development of an economic theory of fishing that emphasizes the problem of producing knowledge about the location of fish. When the fisheries production problem is viewed from this perspective it tends to resemble the intellectual property problem much more than the traditional common property problem.2 The central question becomes how to maintain the incentives for the production of new knowledge in the face of a highly impaired system of property rights for knowledge. Although fisheries may seem, at first glance, to be far removed from the problems of, for example, research and development, I would assert that the fundamental problem is the same and that many of the institutional and behavioral responses predicted by this theory and found in fisheries have strong parallels elsewhere in the economy. In the context of the fishery, the specific problem addressed here is this: The ocean is a very large, complex, and rapidly changing environment. No individual fisherman acting alone could hope to acquire the experience necessary to establish the regularity or predictability required for its successful exploitation. This means that knowledge of the ocean must be acquired and exchanged by a large number of individuals. However, when combined with the of capture-that is, the rule that whoever catches the fish owns them-the need to collectively acquire and exchange information creates conflicting incentives. The rule of capture creates very strong incentives for the individual acquisition of new knowledge (through either its production or trade), but it also leads to equally strong incentives for the withholding, distortion, and strategic use of informationincentives that tend to reduce the traded valu of new knowledge. One would expect, consequently, a tendency toward underinvestment in the acquisition of new knowledge and, more important, in compensating response, attempts to establish institutions (i.e., contractual forms) that reduce the impairment in the exchange of knowledge and, thereby, also the underinvestment (Williamson 1985). How this occurs in fishing communities and the effects