Monoidal Structures on Generalized Polynomial Categories

Abstract

Recently, there has been renewed interest in the theory and applications of de Paiva's dialectica categories and their relationship to the category of polynomial functors. Both fall under the theory of generalized polynomial categories, which are free coproduct completions of free product completions of (monoidal) categories. Here we extend known monoidal structures on polynomial functors and dialectica categories to generalized polynomial categories. We highlight one such monoidal structure, an asymmetric operation generalizing composition of polynomial functors, and show that comonoids with respect to this structure correspond to categories enriched over a related free coproduct completion. Applications include modeling compositional bounds on dynamical systems.