In the age of mobile commerce, users receive floods of commercial messages. How do users judge the relevance of such information? Is their relevance judgment affected by contextual factors, such as location and time? How do message content and contextual factors affect users' privacy concerns? With a focus on mobile ads, we propose a research model based on theories of relevance judgment and mobile marketing research. We suggest topicality, reliability, and economic value as key content factors and location and time as key contextual factors. We found mobile relevance judgment is affected mainly by content factors, whereas privacy concerns are affected by both content and contextual factors. Moreover, topicality and economic value have a synergetic effect that makes a message more relevant. Higher topicality and location precision exacerbate privacy concerns, whereas message reliability alleviates privacy concerns caused by location precision. These findings reveal an interesting intricacy in user relevance judgment and privacy concerns and provide nuanced guidance for the design and delivery of mobile commercial information.privacy concerns, and (c) the relationship between MCI relevance and privacy concerns. These findings not only help to enrich the understanding of relevance judgment in mobile and commercial settings but also provide practitioners nuanced guidance on how to effectively design and deliver such information.The article is organized as follows: We first review theories on information relevance, privacy concerns, and mobile marketing. Then we propose our research model and hypotheses. We then report on research methods and data analysis. Finally, we discuss the implications and limitations of this study.
Literature Review
Relevance JudgmentRelevance is defined as a subjective and contextual judgment of information. Early work by Saracevic (1996) recognized relevance as a subjective perception of information by a user. A major component of relevance judgment, topicality perception of information, is defined as a user's subjective judgment of the degree to which a piece of information is related to a user's subject of interest rather than the satisfaction of mechanical criteria such as those implemented by search engines. Borlund (2003) classified relevance into two main categories: objective or system-based relevance, and subjective or human (user)based relevance. However, Hjørland (2010) contended that relevance is never "a system's" but always "a human's." As with the previous literature, this study takes a subjective view of MCI relevance.What would affect relevance judgments? Past research has pointed out that relevance judgments are complex and involve intertwined factors (to suggest a general model of relevance clues. Maglaughlin and Sonnenwald (2002) identified 29 criteria in six categories. Toms, O'Brien, Kopak, and Freund (2005) derived a set of measures for cognitive, motivational, situational, topical, and system relevance. Based on Grice's theory of human communication (Grice, 1975(Gric...