Product preservation and stable units for reflections into idempotent subvarieties

Abstract

We give a necessary and sufficient condition for the preservation of finite products by a reflection of a variety of universal algebras into an idempotent subvariety. It is also shown that simple and semi-left-exact reflections into subvarieties of universal algebras are the same. It then follows that a reflection of a variety of universal algebras into an idempotent subvariety has stable units if and only if it is simple and the above-mentioned condition holds.