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Scientific advice is increasingly used to inform policy. Often, experts are asked to give advice when stakes are high, time pressure is severe and uncertainty looms. In such environments, decisions may be guided by instincts and priors, rather than reason. Yet, the extent of these intuitive judgements is unknown. We use a database of fish stock assessments to detect and quantify the systematic tendency to put too much weight on previous information, known as anchoring, in scientific advice. By exploiting exogenous variation in procedures and possibilities to vary model assumptions, we find consistent evidence for intuitive judgement. We find that anchoring is strongest if model choices are flexible and the fish stock is in crisis, potentially increasing pressure and stakes. By providing advice that is biased towards previous results, the stock assessments may be more robust but may also give a false sense of security as more drastic changes may go undetected.

This thesis is part of the extensive research on natural resource management under uncertainty. Natural resources and their exploitation by humans form a social-ecological system which is influenced by resource dynamics, the ecological system, resource users, and the formal and informal institutional governance systems. Specifically, I focus in this thesis on the role of information, uncertainty and behaviour in fisheries management. I analyse how various actors handle different kinds of uncertainty. I differentiate between social uncertainty (what do the other people in my community do?), strategic uncertainty (what is the best thing to do?), and lastly the inherent uncertainty of fish stocks (how to provide policy advice if resource dynamics are uncertain?). Another focus point is the role of information in fisheries management. I start with studying cooperative behaviour in informal institutions and how it is impacted by the framing of the problem. I continue with analysing how scientific information is created and used in the management process. Two of the chapters are analysed with experimental data gathered in a lab-in-the-field experiment conducted in 21 villages in rural Cambodia. Next to the experiments I also use survey data. The analysis in chapter 4 is based on a newly established data base of fish stock assessments and in chapter 5 a case study is used.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 provides the context in which this thesis is to be placed, motivates the research questions, and introduces the methods used. In chapter 2 and 3, the focus is on cooperation in informal institutions. Chapter 2 assesses the role of uncertainty and its impact on cooperation in natural resource management. I use a linear public good game and a threshold public good game to see what influences cooperative behaviour depending on the degree of uncertainty. In a linear public good game there is only social uncertainty (how much do other people cooperative to manage