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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.