I have frequently bought points from co-workers for 1.25 cents. I'm lucky in that I work for a company with about 5000 professionals on our main campus and a bulletin board where I can freely advertise to buy them.

If there were a large, transparent market for UR points, it's hard to say where the price would land. The people I buy them from are usually using them for 1-cent statement credits. I'm sure most of them know that there is probably a better way to use them, but it might not be worth their while to do all the learning. They might prefer cash now to using them later for airline tickets, at a time when they might not even remember to go to the UR travel site.

One person who replied to my ad at work said "How do you aribtrage them?" Obviously he knew they had a higher value to me than 1.25 cents. It led to a conversation where I showed him how to get the two Citi AA cards to get more points for himself.

"Consumer surplus" is a key element of consumer well-being. If you would pay $10 for a gallon of milk because you like milk so much, you benefit from the fact that most people will not pay $10, and the dairies have to lower the price to $4 in order to sell all their milk. Here, conusmer surplus dictates that you might value points at x but someone else values them at less than x, so you can make a transaction that benefits you both.

The "pure" value of points is not the value of what you redeem them for, it is the value of the redemption, less the cost of both acquiring the knowledge of how to redeem them and the actual work of redeeming them. You might think for example that since third-party award booking services charge about $100 per ticket, that the value of a point is perhaps 0.1cpm less than the award value, since someone is either paying $100 per 100,000 points redeemed, or has done the learning work to know how to avoid the $100 fee.

I have bought points from at least a half-dozen people at work, and never has anyone at Chase given me the slightest question about the transfer. I don't have actual documentation of the date and time and name of the CSR, but I did ask a CSR on the phone and was told there is no rule against buying points.