Consulting an Expert with Potentially Conflicting Preferences

We study a situation where a decision maker relies on the report of a self–interested and informed expert prior to decide whether to undertake a certain project. An important feature in this interaction is that, depending on the collected information, the two agents have potentially conflicting preferences. Information contained in the report is partially verifiable in the sense that the expert can suppress favorable information sustaining the project but he cannot exaggerate it. Our results show that this setting favors the agent which is the less eager to undertake the project in that he always succeeds to induce his most preferred action.