The emergence of “time‐based competition”; is making timeliness an increasingly important attribute of information systems in modern business organizations. This article focuses on the decision support role of information systems and examines the time value of information in delegated decision settings. We extend the principal‐agent model to incorporate the timing of information in the agent's decision‐making process. The analysis demonstrates that while more timely information results in higher value in the absence of incentive conflicts, more timely information is not necessarily more valuable in settings with incentive conflict. This potentially adverse impact of managerial incentives on the value of timeliness has to be considered in designing information systems. Consideration of user incentives may result in designing information systems that do not completely satisfy individual user “requirements,”; perhaps through suitable access restrictions.