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Fake Wedges

A fake wedge is a diagram of spaces K <- A -> C whose double mapping cylinder is contractible. The terminology stems from the special case A = K v C with maps given by the projections. In this paper, we study the homotopy type of the moduli space D(K,C) of fake wedges on K and C. We formulate two conjectures concerning this moduli space and verify that these conjectures hold after looping once. We show how embeddings of manifolds in Euclidean space provide a wealth of examples of non-trivial fake wedges. In an appendix, we recall discussions that the first author had with Greg Arone and Bob Thomason in early 1995 and explain how these are related to our conjectures.