An Enforcement-Coalition Model: Fishermen and Authorities Forming Coalitions

The paper sets up a four-stage enforcement model of fish quotas. The purpose of the paper is to show how the level of enforcement set by the authorities affects the way fishermen form coalitions. We show that a high level of control effort yields less co-operation among fishermen, while in the case of low control effort, coalitions are somewhat self-enforcing. The paper further discusses how the optimal enforcement level changes when the coalition formation among authorities changes: centralised, partly centralised and decentralised authorities. We show that decentralised authorities set a lower level of control effort compared to the centralised authorities. The theoretical results are illustrated by simulations of the Baltic Sea cod fishery.The authors acknowledge valuable comments and suggestions from Frank Jensen and Niels Vestergaard.