We've already mentioned this year's winners of the AERE Publication of Enduring Quality Award (and the potential impact on longevity) but they never got their props.
Glenn Blomquist has gratiously let us use his description of these contributions. Read it while eating some banquet chicken and rice and you'll feel like you were actually in Chicago at the AERE luncheon (I would have also said watery tea but we only got water).
Here are the papers that every fisheries economist knows by heart:
H. Scott Gordon. "The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource: The Fishery" Journal of Political Economy 62, 2 (April 1954): 124-142.
Anthony Scott. "The Fishery: The Objectives of Sole Ownership" Journal of Political Economy 63, 2 (April 1955): 116-124.
In H. Scott Gordon’s 1954 article in the Journal of Political Economy, he considered a single, open access fishery to illustrate the problem of overuse. He demonstrated that fishing effort will increase as long as average product (or revenue) is greater than marginal cost of fishing effort. Individuals who are making decisions about fishing have little or no incentive to take into account that their effort reduces the catch of others who fish. They ignore the fact that marginal product of fishing effort is less than average product. The reason is if they don’t catch the fish someone else will. The value of the fishery to society is not maximized because of the external effect imposed on others who fish.
A year later in the Journal of Political Economy Anthony Scott developed an important qualification. He agreed with Gordon that when “everybody’s property is nobody’s property” too much effort is likely to be devoted to fishing. He showed, however, that if there was sole ownership of the fishery as well as private ownership of fishing boats, then fishing effort will be socially optimal. Maximizing monopoly revenue leads to the social optimum because the sole (pun intended) owner owns only one fishery and does not influence market price.
The impact of these two papers has been huge. A search of the Web of Science showed 817 citations to the Gordon article. Analysis gives insight into the breadth and almost timeless nature of their contributions.
For the Gordon article, citations have remained in the double-digits every year since 1977 and not dropped below 21 per year since 1997. It has been cited most widely by authors affiliated with US and Canadian institutions (58% and 17%, respectively), but has also been cited extensively by researchers in Norway, England, Australia, the Netherlands, Japan, and New Zealand as well as 38 other countries. Besides Economics and Fisheries, the subject areas for the citing papers include Environmental Studies, Law, International Relations, Business, Environmental Sciences, Ecology, Sociology, Planning and Development, Agricultural Economics and Policy, Anthropology, Political Science, Public Administration, and Geography. This impact constitutes a home run or hat trick by anybody’s metric.
For Tony Scott’s related but somewhat more narrowly focused paper, Web of Science showed 254 citations. Even in some of the most recent years, this paper has enjoyed double-digit citations. Like the Gordon paper, Tony’s paper has been most popular with researchers in the US and Canada, with substantial interest also from England, Norway, and Australia, as well as 17 other countries. The institutions represented by citing authors have been diverse, with no single institution accounting for more than 9 citations. Like the Gordon paper, the same wide range of subject categories (beyond just Economics and Fisheries) are represented among the citing journals. Tony Scott’s paper stands solidly alongside Scott Gordon’s as a second formidable contribution.
The roots of the modern literature on fishery economics can be traced to these two articles. Most environmental and resource economics textbooks today have a section based on these two articles. More than 50 years since their publication people still cite the papers. Probably they would be cited even more, but their insights are now "common knowledge". The scholars who study the world of citations call it "obliteration by incorporation." The papers are so fundamental that they become part of our daily thinking, and we sometimes feel no need to cite the contribution anymore. These two papers together created the foundation for the field of renewable resource economics. They are the pioneering work on socially efficient management of renewable resources, such as fisheries, when they are treated as common property. Without a doubt, these articles by H. Scott Gordon and Anthony Scott are Publications of Enduring Quality.
