#12 - An independent computer service company tallied the

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below!

[par453]

Can someone please explain what market share is and how it affects the argument?

[Brook Miscoski]

Par,

"Market Share" is about what product choices consumers make. For instance, Apple's iPhone has a "share" of the market for mobile phones, determined by the proportion of consumers who choose the iPhone instead of some other mobile phone.

By telling you that the observations are adjusted for "market share," they are telling you that the difference in the proportion of service requests isn't explained by who sold the most products. That means that you can't select an answer like (D), but I believe you could select (B) even if you didn't know that. What (B) indicates is that a computer could be very unreliable without the independent computer service doing repairs on that computer, because the manufacturer could be handling repairs itself.

[Moris_cn]

I know the answer choices other than (B) are incorrect but since the stimulus states that ProBit is the more reliable brand, I thought it was only comparing KRV and ProBit while (B) seems to include a variety of brands. Could someone explain this? Thanks!

[Adam Tyson]

You're correct, Moris, that the author is only comparing the two brands mentioned, but what he's failing to consider is that the owners of any two different brands might not be equally likely to call this independent company when they need service. Maybe people owning KRV computers are more likely to call them in general, while ProBit owners are more likely to call ProBit directly? Answer B didn't have to be specific about these brands, but only needed to point out that the author made this unwarranted assumption about the likelihood that any given computer owner would call this company. Once we realize that some people might call the manufacturer instead, we should have some reasonable doubts about the conclusion, and that's the essence of a weaken question. We don't have to disprove the conclusion, just raise a doubt!

[sltu22]

Hello,

I am a bit confused by the final answer to this question. After reading the stimulus, I initially looked for an answer that pointed out the fact that not all computer brands have sold the same number of computers. If KRV is far more commonly owned than ProBit, then the proportion of service requests is not an accurate reflection of reliability since, of course, the more popular computer will have more service requests.

I had narrowed down my answer choices to (B) and (D) and I ended up selecting (D), which was incorrect. I knew that (B) weakened the argument, but I felt that (D) did as well. Part of my issue was that I was confused by the term "market share". I interpreted this to mean that the brands covered by the service company differed widely in their ownership numbers. This is exactly what I had envisioned in my initial thought process. Of course, (B) also made sense--the service requests for the company are not necessarily proportionate to the overall service requests for a computer brand--but I went with (D) since it seemed to resemble my initial thought process.

I am not sure why (D) is any less weakening than (B). Perhaps I misunderstood what "market share" really meant? It's frustrating that the LSAT uses these ambiguous terms but claims that we don't need any prior knowledge to solve the problems. I feel like certain interpretations of "market share" could have led to answer choice (D) being stronger.

Any explanation would be great, thanks!

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi sltu,

The issue of market share is explicitly covered by the stimulus. It gives the results of the survey AFTER accounting for market share. That means instead of reporting pure numbers of repair calls, it's reporting the calls as a proportion of calls based on the company's market share. It won't weaken the stimulus that the companies vary wildly in market share as long as the tally considers the market share in the report. It did, so answer choice (D) would have no impact on the argument.

Answer choice (B) on the other hand is something that would weaken the use of the data. The conclusion is based on using the proportion of service calls to overall market share as a way to judge the reliability of computers. But answer choice (B) suggests that maybe the data isn't complete. Maybe one of the companies fixes their computers in-house, and so there are fewer calls to independent repair shops? That calls into question the value of the survey data because it's only accounting for independent repairs instead of all repairs.

Hope that helps!

[g_lawyered]

Hi P.S.
Why is (C) incorrect? I prephrased that the correct answer choice needed to demonstrate that Profit isn't as reliable as author claims or that Profit has the same amount or more service request than KRV. With my analysis, I chose (C) because I thought it weakened the conclusion because it states that the independent company receives more service requests for Profit, this means that Profit isn't as reliable as claimed. Is doesn't (C) weaken the conclusion?

Why is (A) incorrect? I contemplated with (A) because I interpreted "other computer brands clustered much closer to Profit level service requests" to mean that there are other companies equally/just as reliable than Profit because they have the same proportion/number of service requests as Probit. Meaning that Profbit isn't the more reliable choice. I decided (C) better weakened the conclusion than (A) and chose (C). But what makes (A) incorrect?

I'm struggling with Weaken questions & I'm trying to understand what I'm misunderstanding about the answer choices.
Please help.
Thanks in advance!

[Jeff Wren]

Hi g_lawyered,

The argument in the stimulus deals with the concepts of numbers and percentages, a topic that shows up frequently in logical reasoning and one the often gives test takers trouble. Often, a raw number is incorrectly used when a percentage should be used or vice versa.

Here, the argument is correctly using each brand's proportion of service requests "after factoring in each brand's market share." This means that they didn't just look at which company had the most service requests in terms of raw number. That wouldn't really be a good way to judge how reliable a computer brand is because the most popular brand would probably require more service requests all other things being equal just because a lot more people use that brand. Instead, they factored in each brand's market share, meaning that they adjusted the raw number of requests for each brand by the brand's market share (or overall popularity). For example, if ProBit got half the service requests but also represented half of the computer market, that would be totally normal.

Answer (C) doesn't weaken the argument because it just addresses the raw number of requests without factoring in market share. It's completely fine if ProBit received more service requests in total than other companies as long as ProBit received a fewer proportion of requests after adjusting for its market share. Again, if ProBit represented a huge majority of the market, it could still have the highest raw number while still being the lowest proportion after factoring market share.

Answer (A) is wrong because it is completely consistent with the argument presented in the stimulus. The conclusion in the argument only states that ProBit is more reliable than KRV. The fact that the other brands in the tally were closer to ProBit than KRV does not change the fact that ProBit had a lower proportion of service requests than KRV after adjusting for market share, which suggests that ProBit is more reliable than KRV.