Comparative Analysis of Market Demand and Individual Demand for Major Fish Species in Korea

Inverse demand models are well established as market demands in theory and practice of the existing literature. However, the derivation and its interpretation of individual demands from the market demands are not well known in the literature. This paper analyzes the fish market in Korea by the inverse demand model and shows how we deduce the consumer's responses from the market responses when the markets determine the prices by the quantities demanded. It illustrates empirically how this can be done applying to the korean fish market data. The empirical results show that all fishes are price inflexible and mackerels and hairtails are scale flexible in the market demand while mackerels, hairtails, and croakers are price elastic and mackerels and hairtails are income inelastic in the individual demand. The methodology and empirics used in the paper will make a contribution to the existing literature especially for the purpose of recovering consumer's demand from the market demand, thus implementing the policies to administer the fish markets.