Today, there is a growing sense of urgency among fisheries scientists regarding the management of fish stocks, particularly among those who predict the imminent collapse of the fishing industry due to stock depletion. This book takes a game theoretic approach to discussing potential solutions to the problem of fish stock depletion. Acknowledging the classification of fish stocks as destructible renewable resources, these essays are concerned with the question of how much of the stock should be consumed today and how much should be left in place for the future. The book targets both economists and students of economics who are familiar with the tools of their trade but not necessarily familiar with game theory in the context of fisheries management. Importantly, the goal is not to give a summary evaluation of the current views of the ‘appropriate’ response to immediate policy questions, but rather to describe the ways in which the problems at hand can be productively formulated and approached using game theory and couched on real world fisheries. Game Theory and Fisheries consists of twelve previously published but updated articles in fisheries management, a number of which address a gap in the fisheries literature by modelling and analysing the exploitation of fishery resources in a two-agent fishery, in both cooperative and non-cooperative environments. The author’s work ultimately illustrates that the analysis of strategic interaction between those with access to shared fishery resources will be incomplete without the use of game theory.

This volume contains eleven articles which deal with different aspects of dynaoic and differential game theory and its applications in economic modeling and decision making. All but one of these were presented as invited papers in special sessions I organized at the 7th Annual Conference on Economic Dynamics and Control in London, England, during the period June 26-28, 1985. The first article, which comprises Chapter 1, provides a general introduction to the topic of dynamic and differential game theory, discusses various noncooperative equilibrium solution concepts, includ ing Nash, Stackelberg, and Consistent Conjectural Variations equilibria, and a number of issues such as feedback and time-consistency. The second chapter deals with the role of information in Nash equilibria and the role of leadership in Stackelberg problems. A special type of a Stackelberg problem is the one in which one dominant player (leader) acquires dynamic information involving the actions of the others (followers), and constructs policies (so-called incentives) which enforce a certain type of behavior on the followers; Chapter 3 deals with such a class of problems and presents some new theoretical results on the existence of affine incentive policies. The topic of Chapter 4 is the computation of equilibria in discounted stochastic dynamic games. Here, for problems with finite state and decision spaces, existing algorithms are reviewed, with a comparative study of their speeds of convergence, and a new algorithm for the computation of nonzero-sum game equilibria is presented.

This book is the first to present in a systematic manner the application of game theory to fisheries management at both international and national levels. Strategic interaction among fishers and nations exploiting fishery resources is an inescapable fact of life. This has long been recognized at the international level, and is becoming increasingly recognized at the national/regional level. It follows, therefore, that, in order to be able to analyse effectively the management of these resources, the theory of strategic interaction ̶ game theory ̶ must be brought to bear. In this book the step-by-step development of the game theory is accompanied by numerous applications to the real world of fisheries management policy. As such, it is designed to appeal to policy makers and stakeholders, as well as to graduate students in Economics.

This book includes chapters by experts from developing and developed countries that apply game theory to issues in natural resources and the environment, demonstrating the usefulness of game theory in policy-making and appealing to a wide audience.

Abstract: This paper provides a review of various applications of cooperative game theory (CGT) to issues of natural and environmental resources. With an increase in the level of competition over environmental and natural resources, the incidents of disputes have been at the center of allocation agreements. The paper reviews the cases of common pool resources such as fisheries and forests, and cases of environmental pollution such as acid rain, flow, and stock pollution. In addition to providing examples of cooperative solutions to allocation problems, the conclusion from this review suggests that cooperation over scarce environmental and natural resources is possible under a variety of physical conditions and institutional arrangements. CGT applications to international fishery disputes are especially useful in that they have been making headway in policy-related agreements among states and regions of the world. Forest applications are more local in nature, but of great relevance in solving disputes among communities and various levels of governments.

Capture fisheries make contributions to the world economy that are below their potential. Many of the world's capture fishery resources have been overexploited with some facing collapse. This book presents an overview of the current economics of capture fisheries and examines how they can achieve their full economic potential