Perhaps no single area of recent inquiry has had greater impact on production economics than the duality results of Shepard, McFadden, and Uzawa. As Lau, Binswanger, and others have argued, these dual approaches (cost and profit functions) have substantial advantages over primal specifications (production functions plus equilibrium conditions). Although cost minimization is attractive for some problems, like measuring the elasticity of substitution, it seems sensible to view output as endogenous. Thus, one must explain output changesat least for proper estimation. This leads to profit maximization or some other explicit behavioral assumption. The profit function approach is used increasingly in agricultural economics (Lau and Yotopolous; Weaver; Yotopolous, Lau, Lin). Generally, this approach is applied without formal recognition of risk or risk-averse behavior. The purpose of this note is to illustrate the changes in expected profit given various models of risk. It shows that risk aversion biases the certainty results regarding factor demands and output supplies derived from the profit function. The qualitative and quantitative nature of these biases also are analyzed. These results should help researchers discern problems with the certainty approach and the possible consequences in agricultural applications where risk is present.