We present evidence that intrinsic demand for information about the future is increasing in expected future consumption utility. In the first experiment, subjects may resolve a lottery now or later. The information is useless for decision making, but the larger the reward, the more likely subjects are to pay to resolve the lottery early. In the second experiment, subjects may pay to avoid being tested for herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) and the more highly feared type 2 (HSV-2). Subjects are three times more likely to avoid testing for HSV-2, suggesting that more aversive outcomes lead to more information avoidance. In a third experiment, subjects make choices about when to get tested for a fictional disease. Some subjects behave in a way consistent with expected utility theory, and others exhibit greater delay of information for more severe diseases. We also find that information choice is correlated with positive affect, ambiguity aversion, and time preference, as some theories predict. Data, as supplemental material, are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2550 . This paper was accepted by Teck-Hua Ho, behavioral economics.

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This article examines the importance of adjustments to corporate financial statements for credit risk assessment. Prior research has tended to examine individual adjustments one at a time. As correlations among adjustments and control variables may bias inferences when researchers examine a single adjustment and ignore other adjustments, our results provide important new information about previous research by documenting whether or not such bias exists. We find that financial statement recasting adjustmentswhich aim to better reflect firms' indebtedness, financing costs and recurring earnings than reported financial numbersare reflected in bond yield spreads and have an economically significant impact on credit pricing and loss forecasting. Among individual adjustment categories, we find that those for off-balance-sheet leases, defined benefit pensions and securitized debt have an economically significant impact on credit pricing and loss forecasting. Accounting and Finance 54 (2014) 47-82 2 Of course, Moody's makes these adjustments for their own credit-ratings process, and the adjustment process involves a necessary degree of judgment and assumptionmaking. Further, rating-agency analysts may respond to incentives to bias their adjustments. While this opens the possibility that Moody's adjustments are systematically different in some way from common practice among analysts, this possibility must be weighed against the availability of data sources containing a comprehensive set of adjustments. To our knowledge, no such data sources are available in comparably sufficient scale.

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