Dissections of strange $q$-series

Abstract

In a study of congruences for the Fishburn numbers, Andrews and Sellers observed empirically that certain polynomials appearing in the dissections of the partial sums of the Kontsevich-Zagier series are divisible by a certain $q$-factorial. This was proved by the first two authors. In this paper we extend this strong divisibility property to two generic families of $q$-hypergeometric series which, like the Kontsevich-Zagier series, agree asymptotically with partial theta functions.