This phenomena was described to a t in Dan Ariely's The Upside of Irrationality. In it, he first describes a situation in which one would be paid a high salary (I think a million dollars) for creating power points that were immediately deleted. He asserts that most people would not be able to handle the job. To test, he does some interesting experiments wherein students are paid for assembling simple lego figures. If the figures were then disassembled in view of the student immediately after their completion, students on average, constructed far fewer figures. Worth a read.