The Wadge hierarchy was originally defined and studied only in the Baire space (and some other zero-dimensional spaces). Here we extend the Wadge hierarchy of Borel sets to arbitrary topological spaces by providing a set-theoretic definition of all its levels. We show that our extension behaves well in second countable spaces and especially in quasi-Polish spaces. In particular, all levels are preserved by continuous open surjections between second countable spaces which implies e.g., several Hausdorff–Kuratowski (HK)-type theorems in quasi-Polish spaces. In fact, many results hold not only for the Wadge hierarchy of sets but also for its extension to Borel functions from a space to a countable better quasiorder Q.

We begin the fine analysis of nonBorel pointclasses. Working in ZFC + DET$\left( {_1^1 } \right)$, we describe the Wadge hierarchy of the class of increasing differences of co-analytic subsets of the Baire space by extending results obtained by Louveau ([5]) for the Borel sets.

In [9] we have considered a wide class of “well-behaved” reducibilities for sets of reals. In this paper we continue with the study of Borel reducibilities by proving a dichotomy theorem for the degree-structures induced by good Borel reducibilities. This extends and improves the results of [9] allowing to deal with a larger class of notions of reduction (including, among others, the Baire class ξ functions).

The algebraic counterpart of the Wagner hierarchy consists of a well-founded and decidable classification of finite pointed ω-semigroups of width 2 and height ωω. This paper completes the description of this algebraic hierarchy. We first give a purely algebraic decidability procedure of this partial ordering by introducing a graph representation of finite pointed ω-semigroups allowing to compute their precise Wagner degrees. The Wagner degree of any ω-rational language can therefore be computed directly on its syntactic image. We then show how to build a finite pointed ω-semigroup of any given Wagner degree. We finally describe the algebraic invariants characterizing every degree of this hierarchy.

The algebraic study of formal languages shows that ω-rational sets correspond precisely to the ω-languages recognizable by finite ω-semigroups. Within this framework, we provide a construction of the algebraic counterpart of the Wagner hierarchy. We adopt a hierarchical game approach, by translating the Wadge theory from the ω-rational language to the ω-semigroup context. More precisely, we first show that the Wagner degree is indeed a syntactic invariant. We then define a reduction relation on finite pointed ω-semigroups by means of a Wadge-like infinite two-player game. The collection of these algebraic structures ordered by this reduction is then proven to be isomorphic to the Wagner hierarchy, namely a well-founded and decidable partial ordering of width 2 and height ωω.

We show that if ℱ is any “well-behaved” subset of the Borel functions and we assume the Axiom of Determinacy then the hierarchy of degrees on (ωω) induced by ℱ turns out to look like the Wadge hierarchy (which is the special case where ℱ is the set of continuous functions).