RANDOM PENALTIES AND RENEWABLE RESOURCES: A MECHANISM TO REACH OPTIMAL LANDINGS IN FISHERIES

Abstract Recent literature considers illegal landings a moral hazard problem that arises because individual landings are unobservable. The literature proposes incentive schemes to solve the information problem. However, most of the proposed schemes raise huge information requirements and social budget balance is not secured. In this paper, we suggest a random penalty mechanism that reduces the information requirements and secures budget balance in the case of a given number of licensed vessels. In the random penalty mechanism, aggregate landings are measured through stock sizes and the natural growth function. If aggregate landings are below optimal landings, each fisherman receives a subsidy. If aggregate catches are above optimal landings, the mechanism works such that either the fisherman is randomly selected and pays a fine or the fisherman is not selected and receives a subsidy. The fine and subsidy can be designed such that budget balance is secured. Provided risk aversion is sufficiently large and the fine is high enough, the random penalty mechanism will generate optimal individual landings. The budget balance combined with risk aversion drives the result for this advanced tax/subsidy system that does not exhaust the resource rents. The budget balance creates interdependence between fishermen that secure optimality.     

ON AVOIDANCE ACTIVITIES IN FISHERY ENFORCEMENT MODELS

Compliance and enforcement in fisheries are important issues from an economic point of view since management measures are useless without a certain level of enforcement. These conclusions come from the well‐established theoretical literature on compliance and enforcement problems within fisheries and a common result is that, it is efficient to set fines as high as possible and monitoring as low as possible, when fines are costless and offenders are risk neutral. However, this result is sensitive to the assumption that fishermen cannot engage in avoidance activities, e.g., activities to reduce the likelihood of being detected when noncomplying. The paper presents a model of fisheries that allows the fishermen to engage in avoidance activities. The conclusions from the model are that, under certain circumstances, fines are costly transfers to society since they not only have a direct positive effect on the level of deterrence, but also an indirect negative effect in the form of increased avoidance activities to reduce the probability of detection. The paper contributes to the literature on avoidance activities by introducing the externality from the illegal behavior as an endogenous effect on other offenders. For an externality, that has an exogenous effect on other actors, Malik shows that fines are only costly transfers for conditional deterrence (when one actor is deterred while another actor is not). For fisheries, we show that fines are also costly transfers under no deterrence (when no agents are deterred).     

Entanglement dynamics of two interacting qubits under the influence of local dissipation

We investigate the dynamics of entanglement given by the concurrence of a two-qubit system in the non-Markovian setting. A quantum master equation is derived, which is solved in the eigenbasis of the system Hamiltonian for X-type initial states. A closed formula for time evolution of concurrence is presented for a pure state. It is shown that under the influence of dissipation non-zero entanglement is created in unentangled two-qubit states which decay in the same way as pure entangled states. We also show that under real circumstances, the decay rate of concurrence is strongly modified by the non-Markovianity of the evolution.     

Influence of Micellar Propinquity on Dynamics of Ce(IV)‐Catalyzed BZ Oscillatory Reaction under Stirred Conditions

Oscillating reactions often employed to mimic and understand complex dynamics in biological systems are known to be affected in aggregated host environments. The dynamic evolution of the oscillatory Belousov–Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction upon addition of increasing amounts of anionic (sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate; SDBS), cationic (hexadecyltrimethylammonium bromide; CTAB), nonionic (polyoxyethylene(20) cetyl ether; Brij58), and binary mixtures (CTAB + Brij58 and SDBS + Brij58) of surfactants was monitored using potentiometry at 25 and 35°C under stirred batch conditions. The experimental results reveal that the oscillatory parameters of the Ce(IV)‐catalyzed BZ reaction are significantly altered depending on the concentration and nature of restricted micellar host environments. In the presence of ionic surfactants, it is proposed that the evolution of the oscillatory BZ system may be due to atypical proficiency (related to hydrophobic and electrostatic interactions) of such organized self‐assemblies to affect the reactivity by selectively confiscating some key reacting species. However, the response of the BZ system to nonionic Brij58 was attributed to the reaction among the alcoholic functional groups of the surfactant with some vital species of the BZ reaction. Moreover, the nonionic + ionic binary surfactant systems exhibited behaviors representative of both the constitutive single surfactant systems.