ABSTRACT
Despite academics' low level of interest in decision-usefulness in teaching, they have used it more widely in their research. It seems that at some date around 1967, most researchers adopted the unstated premise that decision usefulness was the test of good accounting. That development was like a neutral (neither hostile nor friendly) takeover in the dead of night. Decision-usefulness literature was seldom quoted, but all of a sudden the decision-usefulness objective was taken for granted. This change in accounting research can not be documented by reference to an explicit statement in a committee report or by a leading authority, but a careful review of the research reported in the major academic journals shows that it happened. An interesting example was the use of the market response test of newly-revealed data. The presumption generally has been that if a securities market responds to specified data, those data are useful.
