Abstract

. Given a bicategory, Y , with stable local coequalizers, we construct a bicategory of monads Y -mnd by using lax functors from the generic 0-cell, 1-cell and 2-cell, respectively, into Y . Any lax functor into Y factors through Y -mnd and the 1-cells turn out to be the familiar bimodules. The locally ordered bicategory rel and its bicategory of monads both fail to be Cauchy-complete, but have a well-known Cauchycompletion in common. This prompts us to formulate a concept of Cauchy-completeness for bicategories that are not locally ordered and suggests a weakening of the notion of monad. For this purpose, we develop a calculus of general modules between unstructured endo-1-cells. These behave well with respect to composition, but in general fail to have identities. To overcome this problem, we do not need to impose the full structure of a monad on endo-1-cells. We show that associative coequalizing multiplications suffice and call the resulting structures interpolads. Together with str...

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