Cyclical harvesting in fisheries with bycatch

Bycatch is often a concern in sustainable fisheries management due to its contribution to overfishing problems. This paper examines bycatch in a multi-sector fishery in which the gear of one sector is imperfectly selective while in the other it is perfectly selective. In the model, the two stocks are biologically independent so the fisheries are only linked through the nonselective harvest externality. An important difference between this paper and prior work is that the bycatch problem and its solution are examined in a dynamic context. In an application to a commercial-recreational fishery, the two-sector harvest policy that maximizes social welfare is found to be cyclical rather than steady-state.