A no-win or lose–lose situation is an outcome of a negotiation, conflict or challenging circumstance in which all parties are worse off. It is an alternative to a win-win or outcome in which one party wins. Arbitration or mediation may be used to avoid no-win outcomes and find more satisfactory results.^[1]

In game theory

In game theory, a "no-win" situation is a circumstance in which no player benefits from any outcome, hence ultimately losing the match. This may be because of any or all of the following:

• Unavoidable or unforeseeable circumstances causing the situation to change after decisions have been made. This is common in text adventures.
• Zugzwang, as in chess, when any move a player chooses makes them worse off than before such as losing a piece or being checkmated.
• A situation in which the player has to accomplish two mutually dependent tasks each of which must be completed before the other or that are mutually exclusive (a Catch-22).
• Ignorance of other players' actions, meaning the best decision for all differs from that for any one player (as in the prisoner's dilemma).

In history

Carl von Clausewitz's advice never to launch a war that one has not already won characterizes war as a no-win situation. A similar example is the Pyrrhic victory in which a military victory is so costly that the winning side actually ends up worse off than before it started. Looking at the victory as a part of a larger situation, the situation could either be no-win, or more of a win for the other side than the one that won the "victory", or victory at such cost that the gains are outweighed by the cost and are no longer a source of joy.

For example, the "victorious" side may have accomplished their objective, which may have been worthless; it may also lose a strategic advantage in manpower or positioning. For example, the British Empire was one of the victorious powers of the Second World War but was so weakened that it could no longer maintain its status as a great power in a world that became dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union.

A related concept is sometimes described as "winning the battle but losing the war", where a lesser objective is won, but the greater objective beyond it is not well pursued and is lost.

In the past in Europe, women accused of being witches were sometimes bound and then thrown or dunked in water to test their innocence. A witch would float (by calling upon the devil to save her from drowning), and then be executed, but a non-witch would drown (proving her innocence but causing her death).^[2]

In fiction

In the film WarGames, the supercomputer WOPR simulates all possible games of tic-tac-toe as a metaphor for all possible scenarios of a nuclear war, each of them ending in a nuclear holocaust (mutual assured destruction). The computer then exclaims: "A strange game; the only winning move is not to play".

In the Star Trek canon, the Kobayashi Maru simulation is a no-win scenario designed as a character test for command track cadets at Starfleet Academy. It first appears in the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. In the film, Admiral James T. Kirk states that he does not believe in the no-win scenario.