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Consider the 2-category of pseudo-double categories (with the weak composition in the horizontal direction and the strict composition in the vertical direction), strong double functors, and vertical transformations. Does this 2-category admit all flexible limits? Equivalently, does this 2-category have products, inserters, equifiers, and do idempotents split?

I'm fairly confident that the answer is yes; I'm more interested in a reference for the result so that I don't have to prove it myself. Even better would be something of the form "for a 2-category with flexible limits, the 2-category of weak internal categories there also has flexible limits".

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This 2-category is $T\text{-Alg}$ for a 2-monad $T$ on the complete 2-category ${\rm Cat}^{\rightrightarrows}$. Thus, by results in section 2 of Blackwell-Kelly-Power's "Two-dimensional monad theory", it admits products, inserters, and equifiers, hence all PIE-limits.

I suspect you could generalize this to a suitable 2-category by Yoneda-embedding it into a presheaf 2-category so that there is a 2-monad to talk about, but I don't know offhand where it might be written down. (Although to define weak internal categories -- at least, of the sort that specialize directly to pseudo double categories -- you also need strict pullbacks, which aren't flexible.)

The generalization to flexible limits would follow from the first few remarks in section 7 of Bird-Kelly-Power-Street's "Flexible limits for 2-categories", which claim that $T\text{-Alg}$ admits flexible limits whenever $T$ is a flexible 2-monad, and that this is the case whenever $T$ has a presentation that avoids equalities of objects. However, these remarks refer to a paper in-preparation called "Flexibility for 2-monads" which as far as I know never appeared. The needed results may exist elsewhere in the 2-category theory literature, but unfortunately I don't know where exactly.

Edit: It looks like the missing results appear in Lack's papers "On the monadicity of finitary monads" and "Homotopy-theoretic aspects of 2-monads".

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks, this is perfect. This nice paper by Lack has a chapter on presentations on 2-monads that seems to essentially be the missing result (see Section 5.7, at least for the claim). arxiv.org/abs/math/0702535 $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 21 at 7:31
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    $\begingroup$ Yes, that's a good paper to look at too. It looks to me like section 5.3 asserts that 2-monads are the algebras for a 2-monad, which appear with proof in Lack's paper "On the monadicity of finitary monads". Section 7.4 asserts the missing facts about flexible 2-monads, and the citations at the end of section 7 point to his paper "Homotopy-theoretic aspects of 2-monads". On a quick glance it looks like that paper does prove the desired results in its section 6. $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 22 at 0:58

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