Deformations of permutation representations of Coxeter groups

Abstract: The permutation representation afforded by a Coxeter group W acting on the cosets of a standard parabolic subgroup inherits many nice properties from W such as a shellable Bruhat order and a flat deformation over Z[q] to a representation of the corresponding Hecke algebra. In this paper we define a larger class of ``quasiparabolic" subgroups (more generally, quasiparabolic W-sets), and show that they also inherit these properties. Our motivating example is the action of the symmetric group on fixed-point-free involutions by conjugation.