As part of your firm’s loyalty system, there is a database with information about customers who have joined, including the size of their immediate family, the number of cars they own, and their income. 

a. Based only on this information, does this database consist of information from an observational study or from an experiment? 

b. You have proposed sending free samples to customers with large families and then measuring the size of future orders. If you decide randomly for each large family whether or not they would receive free samples, would the resulting data come from an observational study or an experiment?