Information and Policing

Agents decide whether to commit crimes based on their heterogeneous returns to crime, or their types. Police have some information about these types and allocate search capacity across the agents to uncover crimes. The police that have full information about types fail to deter any crime, because the ability to predict crimes erodes the deterrent effect of policing. The information structure that minimizes a crime rate is only partially informative and never allows the police to identify who will commit crimes, but it may reveal some of the agents who will not commit crimes.