Lax Liftings and Lax Distributive Laws

Abstract: Liftings of endofunctors on sets to endofunctors on relations are commonly used to capture bisimulation of coalgebras. Lax versions have been used in those cases where strict lifting fails to capture bisimilarity, as well as in modeling other notions of simulation. This paper provides tools for defining and manipulating lax liftings. As a central result, we define a notion of a lax distributive law of a functor over the powerset monad, and show that there is an isomorphism between the lattice of lax liftings and the lattice of lax distributive laws. We also study two functors in detail: (i) we show that the lifting for monotone bisimilarity is the minimal lifting for the monotone neighbourhood functor, and (ii) we show that the lattice of liftings for the (ordinary) neighbourhood functor is isomorphic to P(4), the powerset of a 4-element set.