[Andreas17]

Yes I researched this part (learned a lot from backpack.tf website as well, tons of economy specialists on there) and what I got from it was simply:

1. People get an infinite amount of refined, for free, in the game, and use it to buy keys (or sell it via paypall for money to buy keys).
2. Unusual prices go down because people sell them for less keys/buds, so the prices for the keys and buds go up.
3. People are stupid and try to earn money by increasing the price on backpack.tf because they are greedy.

I don't know how much you know, but there was this guy on Backpack.tf called Long. He had 1000+ keys in his bp and raised the key prices by 1 ref just by himself (because he has a lot of rep).

Until Long was banned because admins discovered he 'carded' keys. Carding is stealing credit cards, and use them to buy mass amounts of keys from individuals on Steam.
Thousands got banned, TF2 economy goes to shit.

That's all I know.

That is NOT how economy works, it may work if you could only buy X amount of keys/week, but this is not the case, and even then the prices in the in store are completely static, and when dealing with a free "economy" (if you can even call it that) like TF2's where everyone sells what they have at the amount they want it makes it make EVEN LESS sense, people should just stick to the normal prices that are on the stores (multiplied times 1.5 for hats since they'd be clean) rather than make up their own prices based on highschool economy classes.