Imperfect Selectivity and Costly Avoidance: A Production Frontier Approach

Imperfectly selective gear is a common feature of multispecies fisheries, complicating management as regulations affecting harvest of one species often have broader impacts. Quantifying the scope and scale of targeting ability is necessary to adequately evaluate policy options which may directly or indirectly affect harvest and effort across a suite of species. We introduce a simple statistic which is useful in analyzing imperfect selectivity and the costs – in terms of forgone harvest – associated with avoidance behavior. Constructed as the difference between strong and weak disposability production frontiers, this measure captures technological inflexibility while controlling for observational inefficiencies. A brief exploration of the statistical properties of “disposal costs” is followed by discussion of potential applications and preliminary findings from the New England multispecies groundfish fishery.