You may not literally see the term risk in many of the chapters of this book. In some of the chapters we implicitly assume that we know the level of demand, the product price, production cost, and the economic profit resulting from operations. However, we really know that is present in most situations. In Chapter 12, we show how businesses attempt to quantify risk and how decisions are made under these conditions, but this is not all. Chapter 5 deals with estimating the effects of changes in the variables that determine the demand for products. It also looks at predicting future results based on past experience, assuming we have sufficient historical data. It also talks about the challenges of estimating what may happen in the future if historical data do not exist.