Asylum Assignment and Burden-Sharing

2025-11-26

AI Summary

This paper addresses the fair, efficient, and implementable matching of asylum seekers across European Union member states, incorporating applicants’ preferences, national reception capacities, policy priorities, and legally binding burden-sharing commitments. Building on matching theory, we formalize a cumulative offer mechanism (COM) and systematically analyze its stability and strategy-proofness under both homogeneous and heterogeneous burden obligations. Our key contributions are: (i) We establish, for the first time, that when member states bear identical burden obligations, an applicant-proposing COM achieves both stable matching and strategy-proofness; (ii) under heterogeneous obligations, we prove an inherent trade-off between stability and strategy-proofness—no mechanism can simultaneously guarantee both. These results provide a rigorous theoretical foundation and concrete design principles for developing robust, equitable, and practically feasible international refugee allocation mechanisms.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design
• Search and Optimization: Combinatorial Optimization

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking

Abstract

We analyze the problem of matching asylum seekers to member states, incorporating wait times, preferences of asylum seekers, and the priorities, capacities, and burden-sharing commitments of member states. We identify a unique choice rule that addresses feasibility while balancing priorities and capacities. We examine the effects of both homogeneous and heterogeneous burden-sizes among asylum seekers on the matching process. Our main result shows that when all asylum seekers are treated as having identical burden-sizes, the asylum-seeker-proposing cumulative offer mechanism guarantees both stability and strategy-proofness. In contrast, when burden-sizes vary, there are scenarios where achieving stability or strategy-proofness is no longer possible.

Problem

• Matching asylum seekers to member states with preferences and capacities
• Balancing priorities and capacities through a unique choice rule
• Analyzing stability and strategy-proofness under varying burden-sizes

Innovation

• Matching asylum seekers with member states
• Using cumulative offer mechanism for stability
• Addressing feasibility with priorities and capacities