Many, many people have misinterpreted this kind of story and tried to apply prices to everything (eg. "buying" support time from staff in the IT department). That doesn't work either, because you can do the same tricks with money as you can with any other metric.

For example, in the dotcom days, lots of companies would inflate their revenues (as much as they wanted!) by simply buying ads from each other, back and forth.

Except when they don't work, like in healthcare, lawyers, research etc.

relevant recent HN stories: healthcare: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3661731 lawyers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3672815