ABSTRACT
Ocean fisheries provide the classic case of the tragedy of the commons, because many species of fish are mobile and access is difficult to monitor. Economist Frederick Bell provided one of the first empirical verifications of over-exploitation of an open-access fishery. In his examination of New England's northern lobster fishery in 1966, he found that an efficient output of lobster would have occurred at 17.2 million pounds. The Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 tried to remove some of these regulatory inefficiencies by setting a new direction for fishery policy. The legislation encouraged licensing entrants as a way of limiting the number of fishermen or vessels in a fishery, but limiting entrants "cannot prevent crowding, congestion, strategic fishery behavior, racing, and capital stuffing. The preferred free market environmentalism approach to the fishery problem is to allow the establishment of property rights.
