Symmetric 2-rigs: coexponentiability and cartesian closure

Abstract

We study coexponentiability in the context of the cocartesian 2-category RIG of symmetric 2-rigs, symmetric strong monoidal cocontinuous functors, and symmetric monoidal natural transformations. Our results characterize the coexponentiable symmetric 2-rigs as those that are deformation retracts of presheaf categories over small categories. As an application, we give an account of the cartesian closure of two full sub-2-categories of the dual of RIG arising from the theory of combinatorial species and the theory of symmetric operads.