A higher Whitehead theorem and the embedding of quasicategories in prederivators (Q2284279)

The first result of this paper is that the \(1\)-category of quasicategories embeds fully and faithfully in any category of prederivators with strictly \(2\)-natural morphisms. This extends to an embedding of simplicial categories, where the domain has the usual simplicial enrichment. The second result is that this functor viewed as a \(2\)-functor is bicategorically fully faithful when restricted to small quasicategories, if prederivators are defined on arbitrary small categories. When the quasicategories are not necessarily small, or when the prederivators are defined only on homotopically finite categories, the \(2\)-categorical argument breaks down, although the simplicial version continues to go through. The author gives a conjectural counterexample to bicategorical full faithfulness in general. The third result, applicable in more generality, is a categorified Whitehead theorem showing that every version of the \(2\)-functor above associating a prederivator to a quasicategory reflects equivalences.