  Fisheries in the East China Sea (ECS) face multiple concerning trends. Aside
from depleted stocks caused by overfishing, illegal encroachments by fishermen
from one nation into another's legal waters are a common occurrence. This
behavior presumably could be stopped via strong monitoring, controls, and
surveillance (MCS), but MCS is routinely rated below standards for nations
bordering the ECS. This paper generalizes the ECS to a model of a congested
maritime environment, defined as an environment where multiple nations can fish
in the same waters with equivalent operating costs, and uses game-theoretic
analysis to explain why the observed behavior persists in the ECS. The paper
finds that nations in congested environments are incentivized to issue
excessive quotas, which in turn tacitly encourages illegal fishing and extracts
illegal rent from another's legal waters. This behavior couldn't persist in the
face of strong MCS measures, and states are thus likewise incentivized to use
poor MCS. A bargaining problem is analyzed to complement the noncooperative
game, and a key finding is the nation with lower nonoperating costs has great
leverage during the bargain.
