Title: Sharing the benefits of cooperation in the Norwegian Spring-Spawning herring fishery

Author: Marko Lindroos

Status: Proceedings of the Conference on the Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks (T. Bjørndal, G. Munro and R. Arnason eds.), and the U.N. Agreement, Centre for Fisheries Economics, Papers on Fisheries Economics No. 39/2000, Bergen.

The purpose of this paper is to study the sharing of cooperative benefits between the potential fishing nations of Norwegian spring-spawning (or Atlanto-Scandian) herring (NSSH). We study a three-player cooperative game where we use Shapley value as a solution concept. Our results show that the Shapley value gives fairly equal shares of cooperative benefits to the countries on average. However, we show further how these shares may be radically different under biological and economic uncertainties. In the cases of biological and economic uncertainty cooperation is shown to be unstable with a large probability. The instability created by these uncertainties is shown to be significantly reduced when simple modified strategies are applied to the full cooperative case. In addition, we study how the game solution changes in time when cooperation is assumed for the whole simulation period. We show that all countries will eventually be better off with the cooperative situation. Further, the solutions are stable in the sense that the countries do not find it optimal to leave the grand coalition at any point in time.