Persuasion under the Threat of Verification

Georgy Lukyanov () and Samuel Safaryan

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Public communication is often followed by private fact-finding. We study a sender who commits to a costly public experiment before heterogeneous receivers decide whether to pay to verify the state, and ask whether cheaper private verification disciplines the sender or instead lets her shift the informational burden onto receivers. The answer turns on the sender's own cost of public information. When that cost is low, cheaper verification makes the optimal experiment weakly more informative; once the discipline margin is active, the favourable signal becomes more decisive and realized verification falls. When public information is costly, the sender instead tolerates more private fact-finding, weakly coarsens the experiment, and may eventually pool. A benchmark with uniformly distributed verification costs and quadratic persuasion costs delivers this phase reversal in closed form. For general symmetric convex persuasion costs, primitive curvature and supporting-line conditions recover each side of the reversal; an explicit counterexample shows that a first-order stochastic reduction in verification costs alone does not sign the response. Public informativeness and private verification, in short, need not move together.

Date: 2025-08, Revised 2026-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19682 Latest version (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:arx:papers:2508.19682

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().