I might suggest that your proposals ignore the fact that the individual participants are not perfect Bayesians, but rather are imperfect human beings with biases and arational emotions - like pride, obstinacy, etc.

I think if your obstinacy consistently causes you to do worse than a less obstinate imitator and you actually see the effect, you may be able to get over it. How rational do you have to be for this to work? I strongly suspect I am well above the cutoff, and many LW readers are as well. I would be interested to learn that I am wrong.

The corporate 'self-help' literature is almost as voluminous as the personal genre. Quite a bit of it clusters around ideas related to CMM and CMMI

If the implications in this literature are actually representative of the behavior of dominant corporations, then my confidence (in the ability of rationalists to do much better) is increased significantly. My uncertainty mostly comes from the (I think likely) possibility that there is a significant disconnect between this literature and the actual behavior of corporations.