India · National Testing Agency · phd
CBT (since Dec 2018). Paper I 50 questions / 100 marks; Paper II 100 questions / 200 marks; 180 minutes total; +2, no negative marking.
Qualifies for Assistant Professor eligibility and JRF.
Official source: https://ugcnet.nta.ac.in/images/information-bulletin-for-ugc-net-june-2025-16042025.pdf
Original questions written to this exam's published syllabus and pattern. Not past papers.
1. The ideas of bounded rationality and satisficing in decision-making are associated with:
C. Herbert Simon
Simon (Administrative Behavior, 1947) argued that managers have limited information and capacity and so accept the first satisfactory alternative. Barnard wrote on authority, Follett on integration and coordination, Gantt on scheduling.
Principles of Management & Organisational Behaviour · Evolution of management thought: classical, Hawthorne and modern schools
2. A consumer with utility U = XY has income 120 and faces prices Px = 2 and Py = 4. What is her utility-maximising bundle?
A. X = 30, Y = 15
MRS = MUx/MUy = Y/X; set equal to Px/Py = 1/2, so X = 2Y. Budget: 2X + 4Y = 120 gives 8Y = 120, Y = 15, X = 30. With Cobb-Douglas utility each good takes half the budget: 60/2 = 30 and 60/4 = 15. Swapping the values mixes up the prices; X = 20, Y = 20 is affordable but not optimal (utility 400 against 450). X = 60, Y = 0 spends the whole income on X, a corner with zero utility.
Managerial (Applied Agribusiness) Economics · Indifference curves and budget sets
3. The Pareto criterion is often preferred in welfare economics because it
B. needs only the weak value judgement that making someone better off without harming anyone is an improvement
The Pareto criterion avoids interpersonal comparisons but is still a (weak) value judgement. It cannot rank most real policy changes, which create losers, and there are infinitely many Pareto-efficient allocations, so it does not pick a unique best one.
Microeconomic Theory & Applications · Positive and normative economics
4. Under the UN System of National Accounts (2008), how is the growth during the year of a newly planted fruit orchard that has not yet borne fruit recorded?
C. As gross fixed capital formation, being own-account work in progress on a cultivated asset
Orchards, plantations and breeding livestock are cultivated biological resources that yield repeated output, so the SNA treats them as fixed assets and their growth as own-account fixed capital formation. It is not intermediate consumption (it is not used up in the year's production), and waiting for sale would violate the rule that output is recorded as it is produced. Land improvement is also capital formation, but orchard growth is not merely a change in land value.
Macroeconomics & Policy · National income concepts and measurement
5. Which communication model is summarised by the chain 'who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect'?
D. Lasswell's model
Harold Lasswell (1948) framed communication as that chain of questions, which is why it is used to plan campaigns and media research. Berlo's SMCR names source, message, channel and receiver but not the 'effect' question, and Shannon and Weaver's engineering model is built around transmitter, signal and noise.
Business Communication · The communication process and its barriers
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