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The importance of the Non-Akrasia Constraint is brought out by recent literature on \"higher-order evidence\"--evidence about what evidence one has, or what one's evidence supports. Much of this debate has focused on the question of what to believe when one becomes rationally highly confident that P on the basis of some evidence, E, and then receives further (misleading) evidence to the effect that E does not support P. Although there is disagreement as to whether this new evidence should cause one to reduce confidence in P, the major positions that have been defended thus far in the higher-order evidence debate agree that ideally rational agents should respect the Non-Akrasia Constraint.

Conservation agriculture-based sustainable intensification (CASI) is gaining prominence as an agricultural pathway to poverty reduction and enhancement of sustainable food systems among government and development actors in the Eastern Gangetic Plains (EGP) of South Asia. Despite substantial investment in research and extension programs and a growing understanding of the agronomic, economic and labor-saving benefits of CASI, uptake remains limited. This study explores farmer experiences and perspectives to establish why farmers choose not to implement CASI systems despite a strong body of recent scientific evidence establishing the benefits of them doing so. Through thematic coding of semi-structured interviews, key constraints are identified, which establishes a narrative that current households' resources are insufficient to enable practice change, alongside limited supporting structures for resource supplementation. Such issues create a dependency on subsidies and outside support, a situation that is likely to impact any farming system change given the low-risk profiles of farmers and their limited resource base. This paper hence sets out broad implications for creating change in smallholder farming systems in order to promote the adoption of sustainable agricultural technologies in resource-poor smallholder contexts, especially with regard to breaking the profound poverty cycles that smallholder farmers find themselves in and which are unlikely to be broken by the current set of technologies promoted to them.

The Eastern Gangetic Plains are a densely populated region of South Asia with comparatively low productivity yet a strong potential to intensify production to meet growing food demands. Conservation agriculture-based sustainable intensification (CASI) has gained academic and policy traction in the region, yet despite considerable promotional activities, uptake remains limited. Based on emerging evidence delving beyond a binary classification of adoption, this qualitative study seeks to explore the experiences and perspectives of smallholder farmers who express positive sentiments about CASI, yet have not progressed to (autonomous) adoption. After thematic coding of semi-structured interviews with 44 experimenting farmers and 38 interested non-users, ten common themes emerged that explain why farmers stagnate in their adoption process. Seven of the ten themes were non-specific to CASI and would constraint promotion and uptake of any agri-system change, highlighting the need for contextual clarity when promoting practice changes in smallholder systems. We summaries this to propose the ‘four T's’ that are required to be addressed to enable agricultural change in smallholder systems: Targeting; Training; Targeted incentives; and Time. Through this more nuanced evaluation approach, we argue the need for a stronger focus on enabling environments rather than technological performance evaluations generically, if promotional efforts are to be successful and emerging sustainable intensification technologies are to be adopted by smallholder farmers.

Darts is enjoyed both as a pub game and as a professional competitive activity. Yet most players aim for the highest scoring region of the board, regardless of their level of skill. By modelling a dart throw as a two-dimensional Gaussian random variable, we show that this is not always the optimal strategy. We develop a method, using the EM algorithm, for a player to obtain a personalized heat map, where the bright regions correspond to the aiming locations with high (expected) pay-offs. This method does not depend in any way on our Gaussian assumption, and we discuss alternative models as well.

We pose and resolve several vexing decision theoretic puzzles. Some are variants of existing puzzles, such as ‘Trumped’ (Arntzenius and McCarthy 1997), ‘Rouble trouble’ (Arntzenius and Barrett 1999), ‘The airtight Dutch book’ (McGee 1999), and ‘The two envelopes puzzle’ (Broome 1999). Others are new. A unified resolution of the puzzles shows that Dutch book arguments have no force in infinite cases. It thereby provides evidence that reasonable utility functions may be unbounded and that reasonable credence functions need not be countably additive. The resolution also shows that when infinitely many decisions are involved, the difference between making the decisions simultaneously and making them sequentially can be the difference between riches and ruin. Finally, the resolution reveals a new way in which the ability to make binding commitments can save perfectly rational agents from sure losses.

Handa and Yakes detail how they computed the theoretical probability that a dart will land in a given region of the dartboard. Finding theoretical probabilities in a discrete setting is fairly simple: Determine the complete sample space of the probability experiment and then divide the number of occurrences of a desired outcome by the total number of outcomes. This method cannot be used for the dartboard problem, however, because in their geometric conception of the problem there are infinitely many points where the dart can land. Instead, they used their intuition and define probability geometrically--as, for example, in Bannon's analysis of three ways to break a stick. The basic idea is that the probability of a randomly chosen point falling into a specified region is proportional to the size of the region. For the two-dimensional geometry of the dartboard problem, size is represented by area. Analogously, size corresponds to length when points on a line is chosen and to volume when points in space is chosen.

How does increased noise trading affect market liquidity and trading costs? We use The Wall Street Journal's \"Investment Dartboard\" column, which stimulates noise trading, as a natural experiment to evaluate models of the bid-ask spread. We find that substantial increases in trading volume and significant but temporary abnormal returns occur when analysts recommend stocks in this column, especially when recommendations come from analysts with successful contest track records. We also find an increase in liquidity and a decrease in the adverse selection component of the bid-ask spread.