Communication with Costly and Detectable Falsification

We analyse a game between a biased manipulator (an interest group) and a decision maker (a policy maker) where the former can falsify scientific evidence at a cost but the latter detects falsification with positive probability. We characterise the equilibrium and investigate the decision maker's incentives to acquire private independent evidence given that it also affects the manipulator's falsification incentives. We identify the circumstances where the acquisition of private independent evidence boosts these incentives and show that the decision maker may be hurt by higher quality of this evidence. (C) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.