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).     

Molecular orbital study of polarity and hydrogen bonding effects on the g and hyperfine tensors of site directed NO spin labelled bacteriorhodopsin

Semiempirical molecular orbital methods (PM3, INDO, ZINDO/S) have been used to calculate the effects of local electric fields and of hydrogen bonding on the g and hyperfine tensors of a nitroxide spin label model system. The results yield a linear correlation between the two principal tensor components g _xx and A ^N _zz at label sites of varying polarity. Hydrogen bonding with a single water molecule produces a constant shift of Δg _xx ? ?4 × 10^?4. These theoretical results are used to interpret recent high field (3.4 T, 95 GHz) electron paramagnetic resonance investigations on site-directed spin labelled bacteriorhodopsin. This protein reveals a close correlation between proticity and polarity at the various label sites. The slope of the g _xx versus A ^N _zz dependence is affected strongly by polarity induced structural strains of the spin label.     

On the robust exponential convergence of hp finite element methods for problems with boundary layers

The hp version of the finite element method for a one-dimensional,singularly perturbed elliptic-elliptic model problem with analyticinput data is considered. It is shown that the use of piecewisepolynomials of degree p on a mesh consisting of three suitablychosen elements leads to robust exponential convergence, i.e.,the exponential rate of convergence depends only on the inputdata and is independent of the perturbation parameter.     

CLIMATE CHANGE AND COOPERATION IN TRANSBOUNDARY WATER SHARING: AN APPLICATION OF STOCHASTIC STACKELBERG DIFFERENTIAL GAMES IN VOLTA RIVER BASIN

Abstract As multiple countries share a river, the likelihood of conflicts over distributing water resources increases, particularly under the effects of climate change. In this paper, we demonstrate how countries can cooperate in sustainable transboundary water sharing under such conditions. We examine the case of water distribution in the Volta Basin of West Africa between the upstream country, Burkina Faso, and the downstream country, Ghana. The latter faces an additional tradeoff between the production of hydropower in the south, close to the outlet of the basin, and agricultural water use in the reservoir’s catchment area in the north. In the framework of a stochastic Stackelberg differential game, we show how sustainable water‐sharing agreements can be achieved by linking transboundary flows to hydropower exports. Our results indicate that, through cooperation, Ghana will have an opportunity to increase its water abstraction for agriculture, which has remained largely restricted. We also find that the equilibrium strategies for the long‐run distribution are stable even with increasing variances of water flow.