On penalty and gap function methods for bilevel equilibrium problems

We consider bilevel pseudomonotone equilibrium problems. We use a penalty function to convert a bilevel problem into one-level ones. We generalize a pseudo-∇-monotonicity concept from ∇-monotonicity and prove that under pseudo-∇-monotonicity property any stationary point of a regularized gap function is a solution of the penalized equilibrium problem. As an application, we discuss a special case that arises from the Tikhonov regularization method for pseudomonotone equilibrium problems. © Copyright 2011 Bui Van Dinh and Le Dung Muu.