A stated preference choice technique was used to understand angler preferences and tradeoffs for harvest regulations in the red drum fishery. In contrast with research designs using opinion measurement (inquiring about anglers’ preferences for each rule and regulation), a stated preference choice technique provided an alternative means for deriving anglers’ preferences as well as trade-offs among proposed regulations. In a situation where there is a current abundance of red drum stocks, managers wanted to know which harvest regulations (at current and proposed levels) were preferred by anglers and the tradeoffs they are willing to make in the process. Our goal was to help the TPWD identify a user-friendly set of harvest regulations for red drum while also meeting their overall management objectives of maximizing angler satisfaction and long-term fishery conservation.

Attributes of managerial interest were bag limit, minimum size, maximum size, and retention of big fish. Expectation (non-regulatory) attributes included average fish size, catch probability, and travel cost. A factorial design of 7 attributes generated 2,187 choice profiles. Accordingly, we used 10 different versions of a mail questionnaire with 8 choice sets each. In 2003, we mailed questionnaires to 1,377 red drum anglers, and asked them about their fishing trip preferences. About 791 were returned usable for an effective response rate of 60%. We used conditional logit to estimate preference models. As expected, we found anglers wanted to increase the bag limit for red drum, decrease the minimum size, and increase the maximum size but they did not want to retain additional fish over the current maximum size.

Scenario analyses were used to help managers optimize the selection of the best combination of regulation attributes for more efficient management: two different simulation results of scenario analysis were made to provide feasible management options. The first scenario analysis with constraints on expectation attributes indicated that the status quo option (the most conservative harvest restrictions) was least preferred and scenario 7 (the most relaxed harvest restrictions) was most preferred. The second scenario analysis with variations in anglers fishing trip expectations showed that the status quo option (scenario 1) was no longer the least favored scenario and scenario 7 was not most preferred any more.

We found anglers were willing to relax certain aspects of management rules but not others (e.g., retention of more fish above the current bag limit). Red drum anglers also indicated a preference for conservation over exploitation. While anglers showed increasing preferences for fishing trips with better fishing and service qualities, they were also likely to be concerned with the long-term sustainability of fish stocks. With restriction and expectation attributes examined simultaneously in this research, anglers appeared to be interested in harvest as well as sustainability.