Generalized Long-Moody functors

In this paper, we generalize the principle of the Long-Moody construction for representations of braid groups to other groups, such as mapping class groups of surfaces. Namely, we introduce endofunctors over a functor category that encodes representations of a family of groups. They are called Long-Moody functors and provide new representations. In this context, notions of polynomial functors are defined and play an important role in the study of homological stability. We prove that, under additional assumptions, a Long-Moody functor increases the very strong and weak polynomial degrees of functors by one.