Throughout the business world today, the competitive landscape is rapidly changing. Innovation,new value-creating propositions, blurring industry boundaries, and intensifying competition on a global scale are all driving businesses to form new connections and alliances at an unprecedented rate. Alliances have continued to become more popular across a broad spectrum of industries, companies, and nationalities. Management scholars and practitioners are increasingly concerned with understanding what makes some alliances work so well overtime while others flounder. Research over the past decades on international strategic alliances has repeatedly argued that mutual trust is essential for successful strategic alliances. Trust is viewed as an important source of competitive advantage because it lowers transaction cost, facilitates investments in relationship assets, and leads to superior information-sharing routines. However, rarely have these concepts been measured and their implications examined. In order to investigate empirically the impact of inter-organizational trust, it is vital to accurately characterize and operationalize a trust construct. Numerous scholars have proposed alternative definitions of trust. Although a variety of trustworthiness factors can be discerned from these definitions, scholars appear to agree on two core dimensions of trust, goodwill and competence. Goodwill trust refers to the expectation that a partner intends to fulfill their role in the relationship. On the other hand, competence trust refers to the expectation that partners have the ability to fulfill their roles. The measurement of the trust in strategic alliances has been an important research topic in the field of international management. However, the validity of the underlying measures is still questionable, and no attempt has been made to estimate its validity based on multidimensionality. Therefore, this study evaluates the discriminant validity of measures of trust. In addition, the risk perspective has a prominent place in the extent literature on trust,but it suffers from being imprecise and fragmented. Therefore, we propose in this article an integrated framework of risk, trust, and performance in international strategic alliances. We hypothesize that perceived risk of strategic alliances will enhance goodwill trust and competence trust based on social exchange theory, and these two kinds of trust will enhance the performance of alliance based on previous research. We test our hypotheses with data collected from 100 international strategic alliances in Korea. Discriminant validity and reliability tests are performed to determine construct validity and reliability using factor analysis and the results of confirmatory factor analysis. The test results show that there is a clear lack of discriminant validity between goodwill trust and competence trust. Amos 6.0 is employed to estimate structural pass coefficients. The overall goodness of fit indices for the model suggest a reasonably good model fit. Our results shows that although goodwill trust and competence trust could be conceptually distinct, in strategic alliances such as those studied here, they may be so intertwined that in practice they are operationally inseparable. The findings also support that perceived risk is positively related to trust and trust have positive relationship with alliance performance. This study concludes by discussing the implications for future inter-firm research and theory development on trust formation. We suggest that in order to investigate empirically the multidimensionality of trust, strategic alliance types may be restricted in designing sampling frame. In addition, the findings also suggest that increasing perceived risks in strategic alliances create and enhance the need for trust. The social exchange perspective presented here, which has traditionally been centered on interpersonal relations, contributes to research strategic alliances.