show/hide this revision's text 3 grammar fixed.

Lax functors of bicategories were introduced at the very inception of bicategories, and I'm trying to get a better feel for them. They are the same as ordinary 2-functors, but you only require the existence of a coherence morphism, not an isomorphism. The basic example I'm looking at are when you have a lax functor from the singleton bicategory to a bicategory B. These are just object b in B with a monad T on B.

My Question: If I have an equivalence of bicategories A ~ A', do I a get equivalent bicategories of lax functors Fun(A, B) and Fun(A', B)? If not, is there any relation between these two categories?

[Edit]

So let me be more precise on the terminology I'm using. I want to look at lax functors from A to B. These are more general then strong/pseudo and much more general then just strict functors. For a lax functor we just have a map like this:

$ F(x) F(g) \to F(fg)$

for a strong or pseudo functor this map is an isomorphism, and for strict functor it is an identity. I don't care about strict functors.

I'm guessing that these form a bicategory Fun(A,B), with the 1-morphism being some sort of lax natural transformation, etc, but I don't really know about this. Are there several reasonable possibilities?

When I said equivalence between A and A' what I meant was I had a strong functor F:A --> A' and a strong functor G the other way, and then equivalences (not isomorphisms) FG = 1, and GF = 1. This seems like the most reasonable weak notion of equivalence to me, but maybe I am naive.

I haven't thought about equivalences using lax functors. Would they automatically be strong? What I really want to understand is what sort of functoriality the lax functor bicategories Fun(A, B) have?

show/hide this revision's text 2 question terminology clarified, and elaborated upon.

[Edit]

So let be more precise on the terminology I'm using. I want to look at lax functors from A to B. These are more general then strong/pseudo and much more general then just strict functors. For a lax functor we just have a map like this:

$ F(x) F(g) \to F(fg)$

for a strong or pseudo functor this map is an isomorphism, and for strict functor it is an identity. I don't care about strict functors.

I'm guessing that these form a bicategory Fun(A,B), with the 1-morphism being some sort of lax natural transformation, etc, but I don't really know about this. Are there several reasonable possibilities?

When I said equivalence between A and A' what I meant was I had a strong functor F:A --> A' and a strong functor G the other way, and then equivalences (not isomorphisms) FG = 1, and GF = 1. This seems like the most reasonable weak notion of equivalence to me, but maybe I am naive.

I haven't thought about equivalences using lax functors. Would they automatically be strong? What I really want to understand is what sort of functoriality the lax functor bicategories Fun(A, B) have?

show/hide this revision's text 1

Lax Functors and Equivalence of Bicategories?

Lax functors of bicategories were introduced at the very inception of bicategories, and I'm trying to get a better feel for them. They are the same as ordinary 2-functors, but you only require the existence of a coherence morphism, not an isomorphism. The basic example I'm looking at are when you have a lax functor from the singleton bicategory to a bicategory B. These are just object b in B with a monad T on B.

My Question: If I have an equivalence of bicategories A ~ A', do I a get equivalent bicategories of lax functors Fun(A, B) and Fun(A', B)? If not, is there any relation between these two categories?