The incidence comodule bialgebra of the Baez–Dolan construction

Starting from any operad P, one can consider on one hand the free operad on P, and on the other hand the Baez–Dolan construction on P. These two new operads have the same space of operations, but with very different notions of arity and substitution. The main result of this paper is that the incidence bialgebras of the two-sided bar constructions of the two operads constitute together a comodule bialgebra. The result is objective: it concerns comodule-bialgebra structures on groupoid slices, and the proof is given in terms of equivalences of groupoids and homotopy pullbacks. Comodule bialgebras in the usual sense are obtained by taking homotopy cardinality. The simplest instances of the construction cover several comodule bialgebras of current interest in analysis. If P is the identity monad, then the result is the Faà di Bruno comodule bialgebra (dual to multiplication and substitution of power series). If P is any monoid Ω (considered as a one-coloured operad with only unary operations), the resulting comodule bialgebra is the dual of the near-semiring of Ω-moulds under product and composition, as employed in Écalle's theory of resurgent functions in local dynamical systems. If P is the terminal operad, then the result is essentially the Calaque–Ebrahimi-Fard–Manchon comodule bialgebra of rooted trees, dual to composition and substitution of B-series in numerical analysis (Chartier–Hairer–Vilmart). The full generality is of interest in category theory. As it holds for any operad, the result is actually about the Baez–Dolan construction itself, providing it with a new algebraic perspective.