finding fish: the tactics of Icelandic skippers

Abstract

We discuss the literature on decision making in fishing and describe several objective factors related to Icelandic fishing skippers' behavior regarding times and destinations of their fishing trips. We argue that the information available to them and the knowledge and theories they have developed often can lead them to several different conclusions. They therefore follow hunches and other processes of decision making. We develop a statistical analysis of data on fishing locations in order to be able to describe the behavior, but not the cognition, of these skippers. [fishing, decision making, Iceland, skipper effect, statistics]