Me and My Behavior: An Experiment on Individual Characteristics and Compliance Behavior in Recreational Fishing

Satoshi Yamazaki,Elizabeth Ingrid Van Putten,Hugh Sibly,Mary Mackay,Sarah Jennings

doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.579213

Abstract

Non-compliance with regulations is a complex problem in recreational fisheries management, having the potential to evoke uncertainty for conservation and socio-ecological outcomes and to undermine management efforts. While we know that in fisheries people make trade-offs between following or breaking rules, it is of interest to determine how people respond to different management incentives to curtail non-compliance. The overall aim of this study is to examine what individual psycho-social characteristics are associated with responses to instrumental and normative management incentives in a recreational fisheries context through the use of an economic experiment. We examined five psycho-social characteristics, three of which (expectation of behavior of others, social norms, and risk preferences) have separately been explored within the fisheries compliance literature, while two factors (ecological values and personality types) have yet to be explored. While information about these two latter characteristics is limited within the fisheries compliance literature, our results suggest that they are relevant predictors for certain compliance groups across compliance incentives. The findings underline that there is significant heterogeneity in the associations between psycho-social make-up and compliance behaviors. Knowledge of this behavioral relationship can progress fisheries management toward increased innovation by encouraging the management of the individual fisher rather than the average fisher.

Highlights

Marine recreational fisheries are ecologically, culturally, and economically important
For each compliance case k (k = 1,2,3), we model the probability that individual j belongs to compliance response group m (m = 1,2,3,4) conditional on the psycho-social characteristics of the individual, that is: pjkm = Prob(yjk = m) = Fkm(xjβ) where yjk is an indicator variable that takes value one if individual j belongs to compliance response group m and zero otherwise
We further explored how the pattern in compliance behavior is associated with five psycho-social factors, three of which have separately been explored within the fisheries compliance literature, while two factors had yet to be explored

Summary

Introduction

Marine recreational fisheries are ecologically, culturally, and economically important. Recreational fisheries are traditionally managed via a mixture of regulations and rules. Achieving an acceptable rate of compliance in recreational fisheries is inherently difficult because there is often no formal mechanism to monitor and record the actions of recreational fishers (Green and McKinlay, 2009). Due to the high numbers and wide distribution of fishers enforcement of rules and regulations for recreational fishing is costly and typically low (Raakjær Nielsen and Mathiesen, 2003; King and Sutinen, 2010). Non-compliance is a tenacious problem in recreational fisheries management, posing a risk to marine conservation and socio-ecological systems (Blank and Gavin, 2009; Smallwood and Beckley, 2012; Arias and Sutton, 2013). Deterrence-based approaches have traditionally been used to tackle non-compliance. Sufficient monitoring and enforcement are often limited and prohibitively costly in recreational fisheries (Cooke et al, 2013)

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