Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement

Current refugee resettlement processes account for neither the prefer-ences of refugees nor the priorities of hosting communities. We intro-duce 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 simula-tions using refugee resettlement data suggest that preference-based matching mechanisms can improve match efficiency, respect prior-ities of communities, and incentivize refugees to report where they would prefer to settle. (JEL C78, D82, J15, J18)