Are Fishermen Rational? A Fishing Expedition (Report‪)‬

Introduction Uncertainty is a defining characteristic of fisheries. Fishermen make decisions affecting their livelihood and their lives daily and even hourly, often with scant information on which to evaluate alternatives. In modeling decisions of fishermen, economists typically assume that fishermen behave rationally, using what information is available to them to construct estimates of the expected utility of the choices they face and selecting the choice with the highest expected utility (Wilen et al. 2002). Cognitive psychologists and behavioral economists have demonstrated that actual decision making under uncertainty often diverges substantially from normative behavioral models based on expected utility theory (Camerer 2000). People have been shown to exhibit a number of decision-making behaviors that systematically violate normative theories of rational behavior, and the resulting choices of individuals, and on aggregate, can depart substantially from what models based on expected utility theory would predict.