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.