Fisheries Management With Many Small Firms: A Mean Field Games Approach

A challenge associated with fisheries management is when there are many potential participants, and each participant has virtually zero effect (small agents), but their collective action may be significant. Individual quotas or effort restrictions may not be well suited in such cases. For the abovementioned problem, we explore the mean field games (MFGs) framework, which considers non‐cooperative games of infinitely many agents. The MFGs approach allows considering progressive costs and taxes, which would be difficult or impossible to consider otherwise, and the influence of uncertainties in agents' decisions on their aggregate action. The mean field games are applied to model a fishery with many small fishing firms, which are more or less identical, and to analyze the implications of different management policies on their economic performance and resource sustainability. The main focus is on financial regulations, which make the excessive effort unprofitable.