Segre and Rees products of posets, with ring-theoretic applications

Abstract

We introduce (weighted) Segre and Rees products for posets and show that these constructions preserve the Cohen-Macaulay property over a field $k$ and homotopically. As an application we show that the weighted Segre product of two affine semigroup rings that are Koszul is again Koszul. This result generalizes previous results by Crona on weighted Segre products of polynomial rings. We also give a new proof of the fact that the Rees ring of a Koszul affine semigroup ring is again Koszul. The paper ends with a list of some open problems in the area.