Efficiency of a recreational deer hunting bag limit? A test of diminishing marginal utility in New Zealand

Abstract

On public lands, where there is no market to signal the quality of the hunting experience the game manager has little guidance on how to allocate the resource amongst individual hunters. In New Zealand, there is no attempt to do so. The potential to allocate the resource amongst hunters raises the prospect of limiting individual hunter harvests, which is normally achieved through a bag limit. Apart from resource protection, the benefits of bag limits depend on hunters’ marginal benefits of different levels of harvest. The relationship between hunter satisfaction and the number of animals killed is explored using data from a longitudinal study of a large panel of deer hunters with latent class and random parameters models of satisfaction, which identify heterogeneous groups of hunters whose satisfaction is differentially dependent on game sightings and harvest. Personal attributes and hunter motivations help explain some of these differences. Heterogeneous and rapidly diminishing marginal satisfaction present a strong case for management of at least part of the open-access New Zealand red deer herd to enhance social welfare by increasing the number of hunters harvesting a deer rather than going home empty-handed.