Generalized diagonal crossed products and smash products for quasi-Hopf algebras. Applications

In this paper we introduce generalizations of diagonal crossed products, two-sided crossed products and two-sided smash products, for a quasi-Hopf algebra H. The results we obtain may be applied to H^*-Hopf bimodules and generalized Yetter-Drinfeld modules. The generality of our situation entails that the "generating matrix" formalism cannot be used, forcing us to use a different approach. This pays off because as an application we obtain an easy conceptual proof of an important but very technical result of Hausser and Nill concerning iterated two-sided crossed products.