Generally, distributed costs are easy to ignore because no one person has a great stake in avoiding them.
Email spam 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.
In his book Principles of Programming Languages, Bruce MacLennon uses the term to describe a problem in some programming languages, where a little-used feature introduces costs that are seen even in the commonly-used cases.
The canonical example of such a distributed cost in this definition is the For loop in the language ALGOL; it offered extreme flexibility but at the cost of making even simple loops slower to perform.