Making Cents Out of Barter Data from the British Columbia Groundfish ITQ Market

Quota prices in fisheries managed with individual transferable quotas (ITQs) can reveal information about the fishery that can be useful to participants and fishery managers. However, there has been relatively little study of quota markets and no published analysis of market transactions that involve barter (quota for quota) transactions which are frequently observed in multispecies ITQ systems. I propose a modified hedonic method for estimating implicit prices from these transactions and test it with Monte Carlo experiments before applying it to quota market data. The empirical analysis of implicit quota pound values from barter trades in the British Columbia groundfish ITQ supports anecdotal evidence that quota pound values do not rise above ex-vessel values even for bycatch species that are consfraining catch of other species.