Obviously this varies significantly and it's a mostly academic discussion, but does anyone have any idea how much mileage programs actually pay for premium seats? In the face of rising award rates, I just wonder how much these are actually costing airlines.

I'd imagine it's somewhere between the cost of 1cpm (the average liability mileage programs value them at) times the number of miles, as a lower bound since we can assume mileage programs don't like people to actually redeem them, just as something to aspire to. As a maximum upper bound, I can't imagine then paying more than discount F/J. Anyone have better estimates? How about when crazy non published routings are involved?