However, academic research (Holthausen and Watts, 2001; Watts, 2003a; Benston,
2008) as well as the financial press (Rockness et al., 2001; Henry and Kopecki, 2004)
have expressed their concerns that unverifiable fair value accounting would make
accounting numbers “soft” and less useful for investment decisions[2]. The alleged
decline in usefulness is attributed to managers’ discretion when estimating fair values
of an asset (i.e. the value to investors of reported fair values depends critically on how
those numbers are measured and the extent to which they are trustworthy).