You can see this in several ways - either the client is being inconsistent, as he makes different decisions based on how the the choices are presented; or he is being cheated by the money manager who lies about the value of the trades in question; or the client simply has non-independent preferences, which the money manager is exploiting (strict weak money pump).

I'm not sure either of the explanations is better than the other in this set-up; you'd have to experiment with the situation, change some variables, and see what comes up.