Public Persuasion with Endogenous Fact-Checking

Georgy Lukyanov and Samuel Safaryan

No 26-1714, TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE)

Abstract: We study public persuasion when a sender communicates with a large audience that can fact-check at heterogeneous costs. The sender commits to a public information policy before the state is realized, but any verifiable claim she makes after observing the state must be truthful (an ex-post implementability constraint). Receivers observe the public message and then decide whether to verify; this selective verification feeds back into the sender’s objective and turns the design problem into a constrained version of Bayesian persuasion. Our main result is a reverse comparative static: when factchecking becomes cheaper in the population, the sender optimally supplies a strictly less informative public signal. Intuitively, cheaper verification makes bold claims invite scrutiny, so the sender coarsens information to dampen the incentive to verify. We also endogenize two ex-post instruments—continuous falsification and fixed-cost repression—and characterize threshold substitutions from persuasion to manipulation and, ultimately, to repression as monitoring improves. The framework provides testable predictions for how transparency, manipulation, and repression co-move with changes in verification technology.

Keywords: Bayesian persuasion; information design; verifiable evidence; costly verification; public signals; Blackwell informativeness; falsification; repression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D82 D84 L14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des and nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/docu ... 2026/wp_tse_1714.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tse:wpaper:131438

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().