“A la carte” management of recreational resources: Evidence from the US Gulf of Mexico

Abstract

Externalities from recreation scale at both the extensive and intensive margins of resource interaction. Recreators have differentiated demands for these margins, so unbundling the prices of access and intensive depletion could improve upon traditional management. We use choice experiment data from US Gulf of Mexico recreational headboat anglers to estimate structural models of trip and red snapper retention demand, then simulate aggregate harvest across a range of trip and harvest tag prices. In our simulations, the red snapper harvest tag market equilibrates at $15 per tag and generates $760,000 in management revenues per year while more efficiently allocating harvest.