Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index In economics, a deadweight loss is said to occur when some people could be made better off without others being made worse off (that is, the current situation is not Pareto optimal). Common causes of deadweight losses are monopoly pricing (or even pricing in markets with high fixed costs), externalities or taxes or subsidies. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.