T. Berger has written:

'Rate distortion theory'

'Little big man'

Neri Merhav has written:

'Guessing subject to distortion' -- subject(s): Error functions, Rate distortion theory, Source code (Computer science)

Jacques Oswald has written:

'Diacritical analysis of systems' -- subject(s): Coding theory, Computational linguistics, Information theory, Rate distortion theory

Guido M. Schuster has written:

'Rate-distortion based video compression' -- subject(s): Video compression, Coding theory

It has to do with data communication. It is called the Shannon channel capacity theory where double the bandwidth equals double the highest data rate. This is of course theoretically and does not take into account white noise (thermal noise), impulse noise, attenuation distortion or delay distortion.