Buyer guarantee and bailout in supplier finance with bankruptcy cost

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze an endogenous determination of a credit guarantee provided by a downstream buyer to a capital-constrained supplier to help the latter access a bank loan. Specifically, the capital-constrained supplier, who relies on bank loans to finance its production, sells a product to the buyer during a single selling season. When offering a purchase contract to the supplier, the buyer has the option to decide how much to guarantee in the supplier's loan payments. Although buyer-provided credit guarantee secures a required supply quantity and reduces the purchase price paid to the supplier (by lowering the supplier's financing costs), it results in financial losses for the buyer when the supplier's realized revenue is not sufficient for repaying the loan. Hence, there exists a tradeoff between the value and cost in designing an appropriate credit guarantee scheme. We explicitly characterize the optimal credit guarantee policy and identify the conditions under which full guarantee is optimal. Furthermore, we show that bankruptcy cost plays a critical role in the impact of the supplier's wealth on the buyer's profit. The buyer is better off working with a less wealthy supplier if there is no bankruptcy cost, but this may not be the case when the bankruptcy cost is high. With buyer-provided guarantee, the existence of bankruptcy cost may incentivize the buyer to provide (ex post) bailout to rescue a supplier that is prone to bankruptcy. We show that the bailout option improves the buyer's profit, although it does not affect the optimality of implementing a full guarantee policy (ex ante).