Abstract

The commercial fishery that primarily targets king mackerel, stone crab, snappers, groupers, and spinylobster in Monroe and Collier counties is one of the most important commercial fisheries in Florida. These species currently face problems of over fishing and/or over capitalization. A dual-based restricted profit function is used to estimate the economic and technical interactions that exist in this multi-species fishery, primarily using own-price and cross-price elasticities of supply. It is found thatthe production technology does not exhibit input-output separability and nonjointness-in-inputs, over all species groups. This result suggests that these key species may be more efficiently managed as a group, rather than with the use of existing single species regulations. Spiny lobster and stone crab, the dominant value species in the fishery, are shown to have very elastic substitution relation ships with king mackerel.

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