ABSTRACT
It is easy to exaggerate the technical difficulties in the fisheries rent-maximization criterion. In many cases all interested parties may have approximately the same price structures; for example, Canada and the United States in the salmon fishery. In other fisheries, the relevant catching or farming technology may be fairly insensitive to differences in the price structure, especially if annual yields fluctuate a great deal. Some broad approximation to the best yield may be widely accepted. Under such circumstances, the criterion seems greatly preferable to that of physical-yield maximization, which does not represent any optimum at all.
