As I understand it, the "*" means that a chip is known to exist but has not been sold so no market price has been established...it does not mean that there's no market for the chips, just that the price isn't known. (There are people who collect error chips, many of them would pay a large premium for an error chip that they don't have.)

The "*" with a letter means one of two things...either the letter (the V in your example) is based on a minimal number of sales (maybe just a single sale), or the letter is the guess-timate of the TCR authors...the * just indicates that the letter isn't based on a large number of sales.

As for what a fair price would be...How much do you love the chip? If you pay $275 for the chip, and next month you see one sell on ebay for $125, would it upset you? Would it 'taint' the chip, in your eyes? If your answer is 'yes' to those 2 questions, don't buy the chip. If your answer is 'no, I'd love the chip anyway'...my advice would be "Buy it!" . If you buy a chip because you love it, you can't go too far wrong.

Hope this helps