<p>The 'accepted answer' is a way for the questioner to</p>
<ul>
<li>grant a specific answer a bonus</li>
<li>notify that their problem/question has a sufficient answer (it provides a way to close the question; at least from the point of view of the questioner)</li>
</ul>
<p>There seems no good reason to me why the questioner should be granted powers to influence the order of answers except for one potential problem...</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Some questions have a long history and because of this there develops a large discrepancy between votes. For instance, at Cross Validated, a 'hot network question' can gather a large amount of votes in just a day. For that situation, a late answer will never catch up with the votes but might be a better answer (it breaks the voting system, which in my opinion <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/338680/is-the-voting-and-reputation-system-sustainable-how-can-we-improve-it-or-maybe">doesn't work correctly</a> because it is not a rating system).</p>
<p>In such a case it is nice when the questioner can bump up an answer beyond discrepancies in votes. The accepted answer can be a better measure than the votes, or at least it is good to have it in addition to the votes.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>So in principle I do not see why the 'accepted answer' should be on top. But in practice there is a good reason to have it on top. I guess that on CV it would be good to stick with the old way and choose for the practical reason to have it on top. There is not much harm in having the accepted answer on top. (One case would be when the accepted answer would be bad, but <em>that</em> problem should be dealt with differently.)</p>
