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How does an information user perceive a document as relevant?The literature on relevance has identified numerous factors affecting such a judgment. Taking a cognitive approach, this study focuses on the criteria users employ in making relevance judgment beyond topicality. On the basis of Grice's theory of communication, we propose a five-factor model of relevance: topicality, novelty, reliability, understandability, and scope. Data are collected from a semicontrolled survey and analyzed by following a psychometric procedure. Topicality and novelty are found to be the two essential relevance criteria. Understandability and reliability are also found to be significant, but scope is not. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed.confirmatory studies adopt a positivist perspective and employ a statistical hypothesis-testing procedure, which helps further the test of the validity of identified factors and weed out the insignificant ones (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998). Unfortunately, almost no study of relevance judgment has adopted a confirmatory approach. Consequently, the importance of many relevance criteria is still unclear.With a focus on users' relevance judgment, the purposes of this study are (1) to identify a set of core relevance criteria using a theory-driven approach and (2) to test the validity of these factors with a rigorous psychometric approach. The rest of the article is organized as follows: We review the literature on relevance and relevance judgment next. After that, we identify a set of core factors based on Grice's (1989) communication theory, which leads us to our research model and hypotheses. The empirical study is then discussed and the data analysis reported. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of our findings.

Active interactions and relationships among members are crucial to the success of consumer-to-consumer (c2c) e-commerce. Prior studies have rarely articulated the relationship between the social interactions among members and their loyalty to the c2c platform provider. this paper differentiates two types of trust in c2c e-commerce-mutual trust among members and members' trust in the platform provider-and then proposes that trust in the platform provider mediates the relation between mutual trust and loyalty to the platform provider. A study using a sample from chinese c2c Web sites shows that information interaction and emotional interaction both boost mutual trust among members, which in turn boosts their trust in and loyalty to the platform provider. For platform providers, the findings suggest a strategic route to building members' loyalty in a competitive market.

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An important question in information-seeking behavior is where people go for information and why information seekers prefer to use one source type rather than another when faced with an information-seeking task or need for information. Prior studies have paid little attention to contingent variables that could change the cost-benefit calculus in source use. They also defined source use in one way or the other, or considered source use as a monolithic construct. Through an empirical survey of 352 working professionals in Singapore, this study carried out a context-based investigation into source use by information seekers. Different measures of source use have been incorporated, and various contextual variables that could affect the use of source types have been identified. The findings suggest that source quality and access difficulty are important antecedents of source use, regardless of the source type. Moreover, seekers place more weight on source quality when the task is important. Other contextual factors, however, are generally less important to source use. Seekers also demonstrate a strong pecking order in the use of source types, with online information and face-to-face being the two most preferred types.