This doesn’t explain why businesses that used a survey experienced declines in profits while others did not. Even if one group must do worse, we might expect the businesses that collected customer feedback to be the ones that faired better. We want to know why that didn’t happen.

This doesn’t add any new information. We already know that some businesses routinely use customer surveys—the stimulus tells us that!

This is the explanation we need. If the surveys are only administered as a response to complaints, then the businesses that administered surveys are the ones that customers had complaints about. If customers were complaining, it makes sense that sales and profits declined!

Even if businesses acted on the results of inaccurate responses, it doesn’t explain why they would have worse profit growth than those that did not use surveys at all. This answer doesn’t tell us anything about the correlation between administering surveys and declining profits.

This could explain why the surveys did not help some businesses increase their profits, but it doesn’t give us any information about why most of the survey-using businesses experienced decreased profits while most others did not.