You'll notice in my description I'm describing as intrinsic tangible costs, e.g. materials. E.g. in this case what would be investment in the hardware plotter, paper, software... etc (There are opportunity costs for time which are pretty objective as well.
That is: I do think that so long as you assume someone isn't for more complicated or personal reasons distributing their work at a loss, there are really intrinsic costs... and hence arguably an intrinsic value. Assuming that your market agrees that you've done more than ruin the materials as materials.
BUT I agree with you, these costs are usually immaterial in most art world attributions of value. That is, who cares if a De Kooning consumed $400 in paint on a $400 canvas.
My interest was that in most industries, e.g. non-consumer hardware electronic goods, it's an industry standard to charge something on the order of 4:1 or 8:1 over the material costs, to account for all the less tangible costs: and provide a "healthy" profit which is liable to not also be so high as to invite competition.
In this case then it'd be expected that the cost of tangible material investment was around $25-50/work, which seems the right ballpark at least.
QED IMO anyway those drawings aren't "overpriced," quite the contrary. :)
