The Demand Curve for Recreational Fishing with an Application to Stock Enhancement Activities

McConnell and Sutinen (1979 and Bishop and Samples (1980) have developed models of recreational fishing and have derived conditions for optimal management policy both with and without joint commercial harvest. While these models are correct, their structures do not explicitly consider the stock externality in terms of the demand curve for recreational fishing. The effect each participant has on others, in terms of quality and quantity, is central to an intuitive understanding of recreational fisheries management and it can be clearly demonstrated in the demand curve model presented below. The work is a synthesis of the above models and the Leibenstein (1950) bandwagon and snob goods concept, which has been used by a number of authors dealing with recreation (Anderson, L. 1980a, 1980b; Anderson, F., and Bonsor 1974; Cicchetti and Smith 1973; Fisher and Krutilla 1972; Freeman and Haveman 1977; McConnell and Duff 1976). The model is applicable to a number of relevant problems, including joint recreation-commercial exploitation, but here it will only be applied to the optimization of enhancement, a topic that has not been treated previously. The inverse demand curve of an individual for recreational fishing on a single independent fish stock can be expressed as: