Economic Benefits of Management Reform in the Gulf of Mexico Grouper Fishery: A Semi-Parametric Analysis

This paper uses a semi-parametric empirical model to estimate the economic benefits of adopting a property rights-based management program in the Gulf of Mexico grouper fishery. The analysis predicts that a rights-based fleet will be comprised of fewer, more cost efficient boats than under the current controlled access management program. Results indicate that in the year of our data, 1993, the smaller, more productive fleet could harvest the allowable reef fish catch at a cost saving of $2.92-$7.07 million, 12-30% less than under controlled access management. Recent tightening of controlled access regulations suggest that the benefits from management reform could be even larger in the current day fishery.

Visualizing the Flow of Discourse with a Concept Ontology

Understanding and visualizing human discourse has long being a challenging task. Although recent work on argument mining have shown success in classifying the role of various sentences, the task of recognizing concepts and understanding the ways in which they are discussed remains challenging. Given an email thread or a transcript of a group discussion, our task is to extract the relevant concepts and understand how they are referenced and re-referenced throughout the discussion. In the present work, we present a preliminary approach for extracting and visualizing group discourse by adapting Wikipedia's category hierarchy to be an external concept ontology. From a user study, we found that our method achieved better results than 4 strong alternative approaches, and we illustrate our visualization method based on the extracted discourse flows.Comment: 2 pages, accepted to WWW201

Search and Active Learning with Correlated Information: Empirical Evidence from Mid-Atlantic Clam Fishermen

This paper examines search with active learning and correlated information. We first develop a simple model to show how correlation affects the decision to acquire information. A unique data set on fishing site choice by mid-Atlantic clam fishermen is used to test the model predictions. Results find that clam fishermen search new sites when the catch at familiar sites declines, i.e., when the opportunity cost of gathering information is low, but also when catch at familiar sites is on the rise. Search following a catch decline occurs at spatially distant sites whereas search following a catch increase occurs at nearby sites. Correlated learning is crucial for explaining the site choice patterns in our data. These results provide new insights that may extend to a variety of economic search problems where correlated learning is important.

Meetings with Costly Participation: An Empirical Analysis

Using data from the Mid-Atlantic surf clam and ocean quahog fishery, we find that firms with a preference for extreme, rather than moderate, policies are much more likely to participate in public meetings where regulation is determined. We also find that participation rates are higher for larger, closer, and more influential firms. These results; (1) improve our understanding of a very common institution for resource allocation, 'meetings with costly participation', (2) they refine our intuition about regulatory capture, (3) they provide broad confirmation of the recent theoretical literature predicting that polarization and bipartisanship should emerge under a variety of democratic institutions, and finally, (4) they may help to explain management problems in US fisheries.