Comparative approach to decision-making : risk-taking by fishing boat captains in two Canadian fleets ...

• Main Author: Cove, John James
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2011
• Subjects: Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0101552; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0101552

This thesis is concerned with a number of important issues in economic anthropology. Substantively, it focuses on explaining differences in the production strategies of commercial fishing captains in two Canadian fleets. At a more general level, it explicates a methodology for formal model development from ethnographic description. During a study of deepsea fishing in Newfoundland, I discovered that captains differed in their risk-taking when trying to locate fish resources. By using certain conclusions from the literature on decision-making in economics and psychology, I was able to build a model of the fishing situation which accounted for the observed differences in fishing strategies. The next step in the research process was to take this model and transform it into a more general one which would have predictive power in other contexts. Three important dimensions of a decision-maker's situation were taken from the Newfoundland model- information, capability, and motivation). The dimensions were combined ...