Trends in U.S. domestic commercial seafood landings during 1880–1995 coincide with changes in factors known to determine consumer demand for seafood and with technological innovations in transportation, power, food processing, and electronics that permeated the fishing industry. Although controversial, the repeated failures of centralized command-and-control management by the public sector to prevent overfishing and the resultant economic waste in the seafood industry draw attention to alternative property institutions that could make harvesters accommodate macroeconomic change in ways that sustain yield.