Corporate suppliers and customers involved in short-term transactions with a firm will consider its accounting
performance to evaluate the firm’s ability to meet short-term trading obligations. Likewise, suppliers and customers
engaged in long-term transactions with a firm will use its accounting performance to assess the prospects for the firm’s longterm
financial viability and the risk of making relation-specific investments or that the firm might not honor their implicit
claims. A firm’s suppliers and customers are likely to be more concerned with bad news about a firm’s prospects than good
news. However, a firm’s managers typically have incentives to exploit their asymmetrically informed position relative to
other firm stakeholders by being less forthcoming about bad news concerning the firm than good news. We expect that this
leads to a demand from a firm’s suppliers and customers for it to recognize bad news in its earnings more quickly. We
hypothesize that a firm meets the demand for accounting conservatism from its suppliers or customers when these
stakeholders have bargaining advantages over it that allow them to dictate terms of trade or whether trade occurs at all.