Non-cooperative Coalition Formation Games in Fisheries

Coalition formation games, in particular partition function games (p-games), have become a standard tool to understand the formation and stability of international fisheries agreements. This chapter presents a stylized p-game to model internationally shared fisheries. In a p-game, the formation of coalitions is endogenous, as a result of a non-cooperative process. The main outcomes of this model are discussed, namely, the free-rider incentives and the success of cooperation. This is followed by two case studies, which show different levels of cooperation among the harvesting countries: the East Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin tuna, and the Norwegian spring spawning herring. Finally, policy implications for the management of internationally shared fish stocks are discussed. As shown in Chaps. 4 and 5, cooperative games are about the sharing of the aggregate worth of a given coalition among its members. These games leave unanswered an important question: which coalition will form? Coalition formation games provide the answer to this question by determining the equilibrium coalition endogenously. In this chapter, we concentrate on the most widely used type of coalition formation games: partition function games (p-games).