A compromise is an agreement (or proposed agreement) to accept a situation in which the parties get variations from what they originally sought, to achieve a compatible outcome. Is also something that any involved parties have to concede in something for the common better good to be achieved in an appeasing manner.

Extremism, is many times associated to an antonym of compromise.

Many times, compromise, is also associated with balance or even tolerance.

Defining and finding the best possible compromise is an important problem in fields like voting system. For example, the Modified Borda Count seeks to identify which of several options has the highest average preference among voters. [1]

Research has indicated that suboptimal compromises are often the result of fallacies such as the Fixed Sum Error and the Incompatibility Error , leading to the misperception that the other side's interests are directly opposed. Mutally better outcomes can be found by careful investigation of both parties' interests. [2]

In the security field, the term compromise has the following meanings:

1. The known or suspected exposure of clandestine personnel, installations, or other assets or of classified information or material, to an unauthorized person.
2. The disclosure of cryptographic information to unauthorized persons.
3. The recovery of plaintext of encrypted messages by unauthorized persons through cryptanalysis methods.
4. The disclosure of information or data to unauthorized persons, or a violation of the security policy of a system in which unauthorized intentional or unintentional disclosure, modification, destruction, or loss of an object may have occurred.

Source: from Federal Standard 1037C and from the National Information Systems Security Glossary and from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms

• See also: Compromise of 1850 Compromise of 1867