Public Persuasion with Endogenous Fact-Checking
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arXiv
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866918153950330880 |
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| author | Lukyanov, Georgy Safaryan, Samuel |
| author_facet | Lukyanov, Georgy Safaryan, Samuel |
| contents | 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 fact-checking 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. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_19682 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Public Persuasion with Endogenous Fact-Checking Lukyanov, Georgy Safaryan, Samuel Theoretical Economics 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 fact-checking 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. |
| title | Public Persuasion with Endogenous Fact-Checking |
| topic | Theoretical Economics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19682 |