Étale dévissage, descent and pushouts of stacks

AbstractWe show that the pushout of an étale morphism and an open immersion exists in the category of algebraic stacks and show that such pushouts behave similarly to the gluing of two open substacks. For example, quasi-coherent sheaves on the pushout can be described by a simple gluing procedure. We then outline a powerful dévissage method for representable étale morphisms using such pushouts. We also give a variant of the dévissage method for representable quasi-finite flat morphisms