Hmm you laugh, but if you could sell dollar bills at $0.75 but you limited the amount any person could buy. And you made them look at advertising, and collected all sorts of personal info on them. You could easily quite a bit of money off them. More then what you lose in selling the dollar bills at a loss.
Rational doesn't mean valuing every dollar exactly the same. Buying a $1 for more than $1 from an economics professor is funny, maybe a good story, maybe a good keepsake, and plausibly worth more in utility than what they paid.
"players are compelled to make an ultimately irrational decision based completely on a sequence of apparently rational choices made throughout the game."
