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  • October 2023
  • Article
  • American Economic Review

Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement

By: David Delacrétaz, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym
  • Format:Print
  • | Pages:29
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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.

Keywords

Refugee Resettlement; Matching; Matching Markets; Matching Platform; Matching With Contracts; Algorithms; Refugees; Market Design

Citation

Delacrétaz, David, Scott Duke Kominers, and Alexander Teytelboym. "Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement." American Economic Review 113, no. 10 (October 2023): 2689–2717.
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About The Author

Scott Duke Kominers

Entrepreneurial Management
→More Publications

More from the Authors

    • June 2025
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More from the Authors
  • Collusion in Brokered Markets By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Richard Lowery
  • Harvard Students Should Ignore Calls to Boycott Israel Trek By: Jesse M. Fried, Paul A. Gompers, Scott Kominers and Mark C. Poznansky
  • O2X: Optimizing to the X By: Scott Duke Kominers, Thomas Jennings and Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon
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