This project aims to establish a better understanding of trust in organizations and how its dynamics may improve organizational effectiveness and competitiveness. Trust can be broadly defined as an individual?s willingness to make him- or herself vulnerable to the actions of another party. Trust is a critical ingredient in facilitating collective undertakings across a variety of social settings?particularly within and across organizations. A first focus of this project is on understanding the circumstances under which people make trust decisions that are accurate?that is, neither misplace their trust nor refrain from trusting when their partner would reciprocate and be trustworthy. When will actors place trust to an extent that is commensurate with their counterpart?s trustworthiness? Second, the project will investigate trust asymmetries?situations in which one party places high trust in the other, whereas the other party places low trust in return. What types of settings produce persistent trust asymmetries, and what are their consequences? Third and finally, do people know how much they are being trusted? This question addresses the notion of trust meta accuracy?an individual's ability to predict the degree to which a partner trusts them. What factors aid people in deciphering others? trust in them, and what are the consequences of (in)accurately reading someone?s trust? Overall, trust decisions that are more accurate, relationships that are more symmetric, and a better ability to predict one's counterpart's trust all have the potential to shape relationship outcomes, both in terms of economic effectiveness and personal wellbeing. The project takes a bilateral approach to study trust from both the trustor and trustee perspectives. The project uses a variety of complementary empirical methods to investigate trust accuracy, trust asymmetry, and trust meta accuracy. The investigation of trust accuracy is based on a series of lab experiments using established experimental tasks; the study of trust asymmetries is conducted in a field setting of firm-bank relationships and uses key informant surveys of managers and bankers; trust meta accuracy is examined in the field context of interorganizational buyer-seller relationships as well as in a scenario experiment. The results of this project will significantly contribute to the advancement of new theory on how trust develops and evolves in organizational settings. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.