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What do you do in the following scenario.
You ask a question, some responses come. After some time the excitement dies down. Then you select the answer which you felt was the best.
Weeks later, after everything was forgotten, somehow the question gets bumped to the top(one of the answers getting edited, etc.). This way or by looking at somebody's profile, or whatever other way, some newcomer sees the question, and gives a really good answer. Which you feel is better than all the existing ones.
Now you are in a dilemma, whether to accept this new answer or not. What do you do, when it is considered impolite to change the accepted answer?
Related: can anyone clear up whether the person whose answer you originally accepted loses reputation if you switch the accepted answer to someone else's?
Though I can imagine it getting annoying if somebody changed their accepted answer several times, I think accepting a really good late-comer (thereby unaccepting some other answer) is the right thing to do, and nobody should consider it impolite. Yes, the owner of the post you originally accepted loses the 15 points (and you can't change the accepted answer on a bounty).
Related: if it turns out that you accepted an answer that has a fatal flaw in it, you should unaccept it and leave a comment explaining the flaw (if there isn't one already). If there's something worse than somebody unaccepting your answer, it's somebody leaving your wrong answer accepted.
Btw: I got the idea for the word "necro-answer" from the badge necromancer displayed in MO/SO, etc..
Just washing my hands off, in case someone finds it offensive. "Necro" is already used here, and in fact the badge was given to Bjorn Poonen.
Of course, if the original answer is good you can soften the blow of unaccepting it by upvoting it – if you hadn't already done so.
I second Anton: you're balancing the interests of an old answerer (to not get hurt) versus the interests of new answerer (to be recognized as the best) and the viewers (to access the most knowledgeable answer). The balance is pretty obviously toward accepting a new answer.
However, I think it would be polite for a new answer to acknowledge an old one: "Although Betty correctly says that X is not known, the following new developments shed some additional light:... ". This is important so that viewer doesn't need to try to sort out what happened.
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