Refugee Resettlement

Over 100,000 refugees are permanently resettled from refugee camps to hosting countries every year. Nevertheless, refugee resettlement processes in most countries are ad hoc, accounting for neither the priorities of hosting communities nor the preferences of refugees themselves. Building on models from two-sided matching theory, we introduce a new framework for matching with multidimensional constraints that models refugee families’ needs for multiple units of different services, as well as the service capacities of local areas. We propose several refugee resettlement mechanisms that can be used by hosting countries under various institutional and informational constraints. Our mechanisms can improve match efficiency, incentivize refugees to report where they would like to settle, and respect priorities of local areas thereby encouraging them to accept more refugees overall. Beyond the refugee resettlement context, our model has applications ranging from the allocation of daycare slots to the incorporation of complex diversity constraints in public school assignment. ∗The authors appreciate the helpful comments of Tommy Andersson, Ramnik Arora, Georgy Artermov, Haris Aziz, Ivan Balbuzanov, Péter Biró, Vincent Crawford, Sarah Glatte, Jens Gudmundsson, Guillaume Haeringer, Cameron Hepburn, Will Jones, Fuhito Kojima, Bettina Klaus, Simon Loertscher, Alex Nichifor, Alvin Roth, Yang Song, Tayfun Sönmez, Bassel Tarbush, and seminar participants at the 2016 NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting, Melbourne Centre for Market Design, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Transatlantic Theory Workshop, University of Oxford, and Lund University. All three authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Oxford Martin School. Additionally, Delacrétaz thanks the Faculty of Business and Economics and the Centre for Market Design at the University of Melbourne. Kominers is grateful for the support of National Science Foundation grants CCF-1216095 and SES-1459912, the Harvard Milton Fund, the Ng Fund of the Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, and the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group (HCEO) sponsored by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). Teytelboym is grateful for the support of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Säıd Business School, as well as for the generous fellowship and hospitality of the EU Centre for Shared Complex Challenges at the University of Melbourne.