American Economic Review Vol. 113 No. 10 2023

Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement

David Delacrétaz¹; Scott Duke Kominers²; Alexander Teytelboym³

¹ University of Manchester (email: ) · ² Harvard Business School, Department of Economics and Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, Harvard University, and a16z crypto (email: ) · ³ University of Oxford (email: )

Abstract

Current refugee resettlement processes account for neither the preferences of refugees nor the priorities of hosting communities. We introduce a new framework for matching with multidimensional knapsack constraints that captures the (possibly multidimensional) sizes of refugee families and the capacities of communities. We propose four refugee resettlement mechanisms and two solution concepts that can be used in refugee resettlement matching under various institutional and informational constraints. Our theoretical results and simulations using refugee resettlement data suggest that preference-based matching mechanisms can improve match efficiency, respect priorities of communities, and incentivize refugees to report where they would prefer to settle.

DOI

10.1257/aer.20210096

Volume

113

Issue

10

Pages

2689-2717

Language

en

Sources

openalex bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref

Cite

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