Public Persuasion with Endogenous Fact-Checking

Georgy Lukyanov and Samuel Safaryan
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Georgy Lukyanov: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement
Samuel Safaryan: MAI - National research university, HSE - Higher School of Economics [Perm] - MAI - National research university

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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: Repression; Bayesian persuasion; Information design; Verifiable evidence; Costly verification; Public signals; Blackwell informativeness; Falsification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-02-16
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-05512181

DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2508.19682

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