Individual Transferable Quota Markets under Illegal Fishing

The use of individual transferable quotas in fisheries has been considered an opportunity to achieve a given total allowable catch with a maximum social benefit. One of the assumptions used in obtaining that result is that the system is in perfect compliance. The presence of violations and the need for enforcement of tradable property rights systems in fisheries has not received much attention in the literature. The incidents of non-compliance, however, may affect the performance of transferable property rights-based fisheries in unexplored ways. In this paper, we adapt previous literature on enforcing emissions trading programs to analyze a positive model of fisherman behavior that operates under a perfectly competitive individual transferable quota system, while recognizing the opportunities for violations of quota holdings, given incomplete enforcement. Considering a poorly enforced, individual transferable quota system we are able to obtain a number of implications for the current and future equilibrium of the quota market, the time paths of the fishery, and the proper design of a policy rule on total allowable catch (TAC).