It's the same reason slot machines, lotto and scratch offs are popular despite their extremely low odds of winning. The dream of the big winner invokes something in us, especially those most susceptible to gambling addictions.
If I need to transfer $1M to you because a some type of "favor", you can buy a collectible like this for a reasonable price, then get it appraised for a ridiculous amount like this, and then I can buy it off you for that crazy amount.
It's a policy that prevents employees that have been awarded shares or options to immediately sell their shares once the company goes public to avoid it flooding the market and lowering the price.
Adding the cost of an employee's health care plan to their earnings is an easy way to mislead people since most people have no idea how much their health care plans even cost.
The formalization started in the connection between lords and their retainers. Gradually every other kind of tenancy was subsumed by it. It didn’t happen all at once — the high value relationships were, naturally, the ones that got formalized first.