Bousfield-Segal spaces

Abstract: This paper is a study of Bousfield-Segal spaces, a notion introduced by Julie Bergner drawing on ideas about Eilenberg-Mac Lane objects due to Bousfield. In analogy to Rezk's Segal spaces, they are defined in such a way that Bousfield-Segal spaces naturally come equipped with a homotopy-coherent fraction operation in place of a composition. In this paper we show that Bergner's model structure for Bousfield-Segal spaces in fact can be obtained from the model structure for Segal spaces both as a localization and a colocalization. We thereby prove that Bousfield-Segal spaces really are Segal spaces, and that they characterize exactly those with invertible arrows. We note that the complete Bousfield-Segal spaces are precisely the homotopically constant Segal spaces, and deduce that the associated model structure yields a model for both $\infty$-groupoids and Homotopy Type Theory.