Fire Alarms for Police Patrols: Experimental Evidence on Coproduction of Public Safety

Effective public goods provision requires coproduction by both citizens and the government. Search costs that complicate citizens’ ability to share information constitute a critical and understudied impediment to this coproduction. We experimentally evaluate search costs in a rural, conflict-affected province of the Philippines. We randomize the rollout of a police hotline that dramatically reduces the costs of reporting and compare it against both the status quo and an alternative intervention that builds trust but does not affect search costs. The hotline increased the likelihood of reporting crimes by 10–19 percentage points. The intervention reduced perceived insurgent activity but had no perceptible impact on ordinary crime. Our findings suggest that addressing search costs substantially improves service delivery, potentially explaining why policies imported from higher-capacity countries may fail to achieve results in developing contexts.