ABSTRACT
The marine life in the Western Central Pacific Ocean (WCPO) contains four main tuna stocks — albacore, skipjack, bigeye, and yellowfin. Skipjack and albacore tuna fetch the lowest price among the four tuna stocks and are usually processed into cans for lower-end markets. On the other hand, bigeye and yellowfin tuna are caught for the high-end sashimi market in Japan, where they command high prices per tonne. Even though there are Taiwanese and Korean purse seine fleets active in the WCPO, purse seines are used mainly by domestic countries (including the Philippines and Indonesia) in the region, and primarily target skipjack, but also capture significant amounts of juvenile bigeye and yellowfin tuna as bycatch. In selling their catch, the owners of the purse seine fleet do not distinguish between the two more valuable tuna stocks from skipjack — they sell them all at the same much lower skipjack price per tonne. The purpose of this chapter is to study the economic effects of this interaction between the two fleets in a game theoretic modeling framework.
