The Big, the Bad, and the Average: Hedonic Prices and Inverse Demand for Baltic Cod

The price of fish depends on quality attributes such as size and freshness. In turn, quality attributes are related to fishery management. This article presents a hedonic analysis where attribute prices of size and quality ratings are estimated for the Swedish Baltic cod fishery. Using information from 5,307 landing days, hedonic inverse demand functions are estimated with a random coefficient (RC) model. Results show that there are price premiums for larger sizes of cod and for cod with the highest quality rating. Results also show that own-quantity and cross-quantity effects are small and negative for most attributes. Thus, there is an indication that the management of a fish stock that changes the quantity of attributes will also change the prices of attributes, although the price effect is small in the case of Swedish Baltic cod.