This paper analyses sustainability of bilateral harvesting agreements in transboundary fisheries. Harvesting countries obtain public and private assessments regarding their stock of fish, and the stock experiences ecological changes. In addition to biological uncertainty, countries may face strategic uncertainty. A country that receives negative assessments about the current level of fish stock, may become 'pessimistic' about the assessment of the other coastal state, and this can ignite 'panic-based' overfishing. The paper examines the likelihood of overfishing and suggests a unique prediction about the possibility of abiding by bilateral fishing agreements. Conditions under which the outcome of the asymmetric-information model reduces to the symmetric-information game are discussed, and optimal policy instruments for intergovernmental management of the stock are offered.

I examine a setting, where an information sender conducts research into a payoff-relevant state variable, and releases information to agents, who consider joining a coalition. The agents' actions can cause harm by contributing to a public bad. The sender, who has commitment power, by designing an information mechanism (a set of signals and a probability distribution over them), maximises his payoff, which depends on the action taken by the agents, and the state variable. I show that the coalition size, as a function of beliefs of agents, is an endogenous variable, induced by the information sender. The optimal information mechanism from the general set of public information mechanisms, in coalition formation games is derived. I also apply the results to International Environmental Agreements (IEAs), where a central authority, as an information sender, attempts to reduce the global level of greenhouse gases (GHG) by communication of information on social cost of GHG.

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