“Satisficing” and trade-offs: evaluating rebuilding strategies for Greenland halibut off the east coast of Canada

Miller, D. C. M., and Shelton, P. A. 2010. “Satisficing” and trade-offs: evaluating rebuilding strategies for Greenland halibut off the east coast of Canada. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 67: 1896–1902. To be effective, management strategy evaluation (MSE) requires a well-defined procedure for comparing the merits of candidate management strategies. We explore a two-step approach of “satisficing” followed by a trade-off analysis. “Satisficing” (a portmanteau of “satisfy” and “suffice”) is a decision-making procedure that attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than identify an optimal solution. As a case study, we consider the results from a comprehensive MSE for Greenland halibut off the east coast of Canada, carried out under the auspices of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization. First, we apply satisficing to the results to determine which rebuilding strategies achieve pre-specified thresholds set for imperative performance statistics relating to resource conservation, yield, and stability of the fishery. Next, trade-offs among important, but not necessarily imperative, performance statistics are evaluated for those strategies that pass the satisficing step. For Greenland halibut, a management strategy containing a simple feedback harvest-control rule based on recent trends in survey estimates of abundance satisfices all imperative requirements and provides the best trade-off in other performance statistics. The approach necessitates translating objectives for stock rebuilding and sustainable fisheries into operationally explicit terms and incorporates a priori consideration of stakeholders' concerns.