A distributed cost is a cost that is spread over many individuals, transactions, or users, rather than being concentrated on few of these. The term can be used generally of costs that are naturally distributed; it is also a specific

accounting Accounting, also known as accountancy, is the measurement, processing, and communication of financial and non financial information about economic entities such as businesses and corporations. Accounting, which has been called the "languag ...

term for total costs that are calculated to include a fair share of indirect costs. Generally, distributed costs are easy to ignore because no one person has a great stake in avoiding them. The classic example of this is "the

tragedy of the commons Tragedy (from the grc-gre, τραγῳδία, ''tragōidia'', ''tragōidia'') is a genre of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main character. Traditionally, the intention of tragedy ...

." If a village has some common land, it is to each individual's advantage to graze their own herd on it, thus distributing their own herd's cost over everyone. Of course, if many people do this the commons is destroyed.

Email spam Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming). The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoida ...

may be considered a present-day example, because the cost of emails is spread over countless users and service providers, providing a free benefit to spammers; though again if enough people use the common resource for their own gain, the cost becomes unacceptable. Specifically, in accounting, an accurate measure of a product or service's cost may include not only direct costs (such as parts and labor in manufacturing), but also an appropriate share of indirect costs shared over many products, such as manufacturing space, utilities, maintenance of machine tools, licenses, staff training, and so on. The latter costs are said to be distributed. In his book ''Principles of Programming Languages'', Bruce MacLennon uses the term to describe a problem in some

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

s, where a little-used feature introduces costs that are seen even in the commonly-used cases. He introduced the term "localized cost" to describe a desirable design concept where a feature does not cause other

use case In software and systems engineering, the phrase use case is a polyseme with two senses: # A usage scenario for a piece of software; often used in the plural to suggest situations where a piece of software may be useful. # A potential scenario ...

s to have additional costs. The canonical example of such a distributed cost in this definition is the

For loop In computer science a for-loop or for loop is a control flow statement for specifying iteration. Specifically, a for loop functions by running a section of code repeatedly until a certain condition has been satisfied. For-loops have two part ...

in the language

ALGOL ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...

; it offered extreme flexibility but at the cost of making even simple loops slower to perform.

References

Bibliography

* {{econ-stub Costs