American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement
American Economic Review
vol. 113,
no. 10, October 2023
(pp. 2689–2717)
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.Citation
Delacrétaz, David, Scott Duke Kominers, and Alexander Teytelboym. 2023. "Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement." American Economic Review, 113 (10): 2689–2717. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20210096Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- C78 Bargaining Theory; Matching Theory
- D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
- J15 Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
- J18 Demographic Economics: Public Policy