Wide right Morita contexts in lax-unital bicategories

Abstract

The classical result in the theory of unital rings that the maps of a Morita context are isomorphisms when they are epimorphisms can be proven in the general setting of wide right Morita contexts in bicategories. There exists a similar result for non-unital rings, but bicategories are not general enough to handle that case. In this paper, we use the more general lax-unital bicategories to prove a version of the result and study some related questions.