ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to compare the use of a fishery by competing fishermen with the mode of management that would be most profitable to a “sole owner” of the same fishery. It shows that long-run considerations of efficiency suggest that sole ownership is a much superior regime to competition but that in the short run in the ordinary case there is little difference between the efficiency of common and of private property. D. V. Gordon first argues that, because there is no sole owner to capture for himself whatever gain there may be from using the fishery conservatively, it will pay every fisherman to enter the industry so long as he can earn something above his cash expenses plus his opportunity costs. Gordon depends upon the omnibus variable “effort” to cover the changeable combinations of men, boats, and other equipment used by individual fishermen.
