From the Conversations with Tyler Cowen
SUNSTEIN: ... So the economic analysis of law has had many good ideas. It’s had one great idea — like, world-transforming idea, I think. And the idea is, when you’re stuck, minimize the sum of the costs of decisions and the costs of errors. Now, that is not gripping stuff. But it’s profoundly true that if you don’t know what to do, figure out either a meta-rule or a particular decision that makes error costs low, meaning the number and the magnitude is small, and that makes decision costs low, meaning you don’t have to drive yourself crazy.
One can characterize this as a reduction of complexity, and thus a precursor to automation.