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Group Fairness in Dynamic Refugee Assignment

By: Daniel Freund, Thodoris Lykouris, Elisabeth Paulson, Bradley Sturt and Wentao Weng
  • Format:Print
  • | Language:English
  • | Pages:55
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Abstract

Ensuring that refugees and asylum seekers thrive (e.g., find employment) in their host countries is a profound humanitarian goal, and a primary driver of employment is the geographic location within a host country to which the refugee or asylum seeker is assigned. Recent research has proposed and implemented algorithms that assign refugees and asylum seekers to geographic locations in a manner that maximizes the average employment across all arriving refugees. While these algorithms can have substantial overall positive impact, using data from two industry collaborators we show that the impact of these algorithms can vary widely across key subgroups based on country of origin, age, or educational background. Thus motivated, we develop a simple and interpretable framework for incorporating group fairness into the dynamic refugee assignment problem. In particular, the framework can flexibly incorporate many existing and future definitions of group fairness from the literature (e.g., minmax, randomized, and proportionally-optimized within-group). Equipped with our framework, we propose two bid-price algorithms that maximize overall employment while simultaneously yielding provable group fairness guarantees. Through extensive numerical experiments using various definitions of group fairness and real-world data from the U.S. and the Netherlands, we show that our algorithms can yield substantial improvements in group fairness compared to state-of-the-art algorithms with only small relative decreases (≈ 1%-2%) in global performance.

Keywords

Refugees; Geographic Location; Mathematical Methods; Employment; Fairness

Citation

Freund, Daniel, Thodoris Lykouris, Elisabeth Paulson, Bradley Sturt, and Wentao Weng. "Group Fairness in Dynamic Refugee Assignment." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 23-047, February 2023.
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About The Author

Elisabeth C. Paulson

Technology and Operations Management
→More Publications

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    Reverse Information Sharing: Reducing Costs in Supply Chains with Yield Uncertainty

    By: Pavithra Harsha, Ashish Jagmohan, Retsef Levi, Elisabeth Paulson and Georgia Perakis
More from the Authors
  • Outcome-Driven Dynamic Refugee Assignment with Allocation Balancing By: Kirk Bansak and Elisabeth Paulson
  • Public Health Risks Arising from Food Supply Chains: Challenges and Opportunities By: Lu Chen, Donovan Guittieres, Retsef Levi, Elisabeth Paulson, Georgia Perakis, Nicholas Renegar and Stacy Springs
  • Reverse Information Sharing: Reducing Costs in Supply Chains with Yield Uncertainty By: Pavithra Harsha, Ashish Jagmohan, Retsef Levi, Elisabeth Paulson and Georgia Perakis
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