They don't link to a paper, but I'm curious if they looked at the effect of "dosage" as it were. That is to say, a slightly better seat might be insignificant to many people, whereas other sorts of benefits would be more appreciated. Also, people may have random seat preferences where they don't actually like front-row seats or what have you.
In other words, they may have proven that people don't value seats very much, but I'm not sure that applies to every possible reward. Something where preferences are less abstract (e.g. cash) might turn out differently for all we know and there's no way to tell if the authors already investigated this or not from just this story.
My thoughts were along the same line, how do you measure better seats? Isn't this at least a little personal? It would seem to make more sense to for example, give a voucher for extra free drink at the venue...
The odd thing is that I couldn't find this particular experiment mentioned on the linked paper[0]. There were several other experiments that seem more clearly defined in terms of failing/meeting/exceeding expections.
In other words, they may have proven that people don't value seats very much, but I'm not sure that applies to every possible reward. Something where preferences are less abstract (e.g. cash) might turn out differently for all we know and there's no way to tell if the authors already investigated this or not from just this story.