A few clarifications:
The anonymous signup works like this: Fighter says "damn I'd like to fight, but my clan disallows it, I sign up with an alias." Only the guy accepting the signup sees both the alias and the real name. Teammates and Enemies will only see the alias. So you dont hire randoms, you hire pseudonyms that you know who is behind it.
It basically just means people can fight incognito without the fear of political shunning.
Items:
People that signup have a default rank of 0, your clanmates have their default clan rank (except the battle commander, he always has 10).
You can change a number in your inventory (default: 0). If you set eg donkeys to 5, then only people that have a rank of 5 and more will be seeing the item in the item selection ingame. It means you can have peasants & elite soldiers. You can also set it to 11, then no one will see anything (against item bombing)
Crime:
Most likely it will work like this: Every village has a crime rate of 0%. Every hour your S&D is > than your daily production, you gain 1%, when its below, you lose 1%. Every minute, a random troop in the fief (visitors or garrison) dies, based on the chance of the crime.
Item prices:
They get raised heavily because of the item rank system (allows better finetuning), and maybe we'll see a bit more tactics in equipment setup. If it is indeed too large, we'll slowly lower it again.