Optimal screening with securities

A liquidity-constrained asset owner screens an informed investor using financial securities. Information-insensitive securities reduce the investor’s information rents. The optimal screening mechanism consists of a monotone debt menu where more optimistic investor types purchase larger amounts of debt. Interestingly, the issuer may benefit from trading with a better informed investor. For any monotone debt menu, as the asset’s cash flows more accurately describe the investor’s private information (Lehmann, 1988), the trade surplus unambiguously increases. Further, fixing the optimal debt menu, when the investor’s private information originates from location experiments, increasing accuracy decreases (increases) information rents for low (high) types. We provide sufficient conditions that guarantee that the issuer strictly benefits from trading with a better informed investor. Our results imply that selling debt is an effective approach to raise funds in financial markets even when investors hold superior private information and provide a novel rationale for the emergence of venture debt.