ICAR AICE-JRF/SRF (PhD admission and fellowship) · India · National Testing Agency for ICAR
Original practice questions written to the published syllabus · not past papersHow food reaches consumers through retail: the market, the value chain, merchandising, store operations, finance and formats.
In the exams: Not an explicit unit in the catalogued exams; programme course
ICAR AICE-JRF/SRF (PhD) — Agri-Business Management, Unit 4 marketing of agri-products
Food retail enters through the marketing unit: marketing channels and the producer's share, supermarket-led procurement and contract farming, retail formats, private labels, pricing strategies (EDLP versus Hi-Lo, loss leaders), service quality (SERVQUAL) and who-proposed-what for the wheel of retailing and the supermarket revolution.
How our questions for ICAR AICE-JRF/SRF spread across the units of Food Retail & Agri-food Retail Management. Difficulty: 10 easy, 29 medium, 14 hard.
| The international food market | 12 | |
| The retail value chain | 10 | |
| Merchandise management | 7 | |
| Food retail in emerging and developed markets | 7 | |
| Retail finance | 5 | |
| Retail selling | 5 | |
| Retail formats | 4 | |
| Retail operations | 3 |
Choose an answer, then open the working. Each explanation says why the right answer is right and why the others are not.
Farmers sell tomatoes at 12 per kilogram. Between farm and shop, 10 percent of the weight bought from farmers is lost, and the shop sells tomatoes at 30 per kilogram. What is the producer's share when it is computed correctly on an equivalent-quantity basis?
B. 44.4 percent
One kilogram sold at retail needs 1/(1 - 0.1) = 1.111 kg bought from farmers, costing 12 x 1.111 = 13.33. Producer's share = 13.33/30 = 44.4%. The naive 40.0% ignores the loss; multiplying by (1 - loss) instead of dividing gives 36.0%, the wrong direction; 60.0% is the naive marketing share.
A market in which a few large buyers face many small sellers, giving the buyers power over purchase prices, is called:
A. an oligopsony
Oligopsony is 'few buyers'. Oligopoly is 'few sellers', which describes power over selling prices, not purchase prices. Bilateral monopoly needs a single buyer facing a single seller. Monopolistic competition has many differentiated sellers.
The 'bullwhip effect' in a food supply chain refers to:
D. order swings growing larger as they pass upstream from the retailer through wholesalers to the farmer
The bullwhip effect is the amplification of demand variability upstream, caused by forecasting on orders rather than consumer sales, batching, promotions and rationing games. Shared point-of-sale data, VMI and CPFR reduce it. The first option states the reverse.
A food manufacturer pays a supermarket chain a lump sum to have a new product placed on its shelves. This payment is called a:
D. slotting or listing fee
A slotting (listing) fee is paid for shelf access for a new product. A volume rebate depends on quantities bought, a cooperative advertising allowance funds joint advertising, and a markdown allowance compensates the retailer for price reductions on slow stock.
The 'retail accordion' theory describes:
D. an alternation between wide-range generalists and narrow-range specialists
The accordion (general-specific-general) refers to assortment width. The second distractor is the wheel of retailing, the first is the dialectic theory, and the third is the retail life cycle.
A retailer appoints a leading brand manufacturer as 'category captain' for breakfast cereals. What is the main concern competition authorities raise about this arrangement?
B. The captain may bias shelf space, range and pricing advice toward its own brands over rival brands
A category captain advises on the whole category, saving the retailer analysis cost, but its access to the plan creates a risk of disadvantaging rival suppliers. It does not take ownership or buy back stock, and advising is not automatically price fixing.
A store orders fresh coriander bunches each morning. Each bunch costs 40, sells for 60, and any unsold bunch is sold at day's end to a caterer for 10. Using the newsvendor model, what is the critical ratio (optimal probability of not running out)?
A. 0.40
Understock cost Cu = 60-40 = 20; overstock cost Co = 40-10 = 30. Critical ratio = Cu/(Cu+Co) = 20/50 = 0.40. Ignoring salvage (Co = 40) gives 0.33; 0.60 inverts the ratio; 0.50 is the markup on cost, not a service level.
A dairy department has annual sales of 1,200,000, a gross margin of 30 percent and an average inventory at cost of 120,000. What is its GMROI?
D. 3.0
GMROI = gross margin / average inventory at cost = 360,000 / 120,000 = 3.0. 10 is the sales-to-stock ratio, which must be multiplied by the margin percentage; 0.3 is the margin alone; dividing by inventory valued at retail (171,429) gives 2.1.
Further reading: Levy, Weitz and Grewal, Retailing Management
Which of the following is NOT one of the five SERVQUAL dimensions of service quality?
A. Profitability
The SERVQUAL dimensions are reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibles (Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry). Profitability is a firm outcome, not a customer-perceived service dimension.
Further reading: Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1988)
Of 10,000 store baskets, 2,000 contain bread, 1,500 contain butter and 600 contain both. What is the lift of the rule 'bread implies butter'?
A. 2.0
Confidence = 600/2,000 = 0.30. Share of baskets with butter = 1,500/10,000 = 0.15. Lift = 0.30/0.15 = 2.0, meaning bread buyers are twice as likely as average to buy butter. 0.30 is confidence, 0.06 is support, and 0.4 is the confidence of the reverse rule.
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