Read the following scenario and answer the THREE questions that follow.
TrueColor, an event management company in eastern India, had been in a business of inviting Tollywood singers to a city called Tivanna, and made money out of selling tickets of their concerts. The stars were paid a fixed fee regardless of the number of tickets sold. The company had a specialized team that negotiated the singers’ fee with their managers. However, for selling the tickets of such events, they were reliant on an external media agency called Zedius. Zedius had a long-standing relationship with TrueColor, and had been instrumental in achieving a target of 50,000 tickets for each of the flagship events. Mr. Sukanta Rao joined TrueColor as an inhouse sales and marketing manager, a position exclusively created for him. The CEO, Mr. Adil Banerjee, had assigned a task of increasing the sales of tickets to 100,000. In Sukanta’s earlier stint, he had seen that similar cities sell more than 75,000 tickets for such events. He felt that, over time, reaching 100,000 was plausible for TrueColor.
Q17
Decision Making MULTIPLE CHOICE
Just two weeks before the flagship event, Adil received a few emails from competing media agencies that accused Zedius of selling phony tickets in the “black” market. When Adil enquired with the security agency in charge of gatekeeping the events, they told him that they had no mechanism to check the authenticity of tickets.
Which of the following options will BEST help Adil to ignore the accusations from the competing media agencies, and maintain status quo?
Answer: A
Criterion: Adil wants a reason to ignore the accusations against Zedius and keep things as they are. The reason must undermine the credibility of the accusations themselves.
Why option 1 is best: the accusers are competing media agencies, and in Tivanna such agencies routinely defame each other in fierce competition. The emails are then most likely rivalry, not evidence. This gives Adil a reasonable basis to set them aside, especially two weeks before the flagship event.
Option 2: letting VIPs in without tickets is unrelated to whether Zedius sells fake tickets.
Option 3: being the largest agency does not mean Zedius is honest. Size may even make wrongdoing easier.
Option 4: attendees paying cash to gatekeepers shows leakage at the gate. That is a reason to investigate, not to ignore.
Option 5: a promised sales threshold gives Zedius a motive to inflate numbers. It does nothing to clear it.
