Jose Alcalde

Hosting refugees: An integral matching approach

Abstract:  Hosting refugees has become one of the most important international humanitarian activities. The lack of international coordination, as well as the absence of an incentives scheme encouraging countries to host refugees, has been at the center of recent refugees' crises. We propose a global solution to the hosting refugees problem. A compensation mechanism allows to get the countries' agreement to host all refugees. A subsequent matching procedure determines the identity of the refugees that are hosted by each country.  From a positive perspective, our global solution has interesting properties. First, under the compensation mechanism, each country has a dominant strategy that can be interpreted as a sincere behavior when asked for their availability to host refugees. Then, when the matching procedure is implemented, refugees do not have incentives to act strategically. The strategic behavior by countries results in the equitable allocation that is the one unanimously preferred by the countries.

Lunch from 12.30pm