À la carte Management of Recreational Resources: Evidence from the U.S. Gulf of Mexico

Abstract

Externalities from recreation scale at the extensive and intensive margins of resource interaction. Recreators have differentiated demands for these margins, so unbundling the prices of access and intensive depletion could improve on traditional management. We use choice experiment data from U.S. Gulf of Mexico recreational headboat anglers to estimate structural models of trip and red snapper retention demand, then simulate aggregate harvest across a range of trip and harvest tag prices. In our simulations, the red snapper harvest tag market equilibrates at $15 per tag and generates $760,000 in management revenues per year while more efficiently allocating harvest. ( JEL Q22, Q26)