  Consider a channel with a given input distribution. Our aim is to degrade it
to a channel with at most L output letters. One such degradation method is the
so called "greedy-merge" algorithm. We derive an upper bound on the reduction
in mutual information between input and output. For fixed input alphabet size
and variable L, the upper bound is within a constant factor of an
algorithm-independent lower bound. Thus, we establish that greedy-merge is
optimal in the power-law sense.
