An Ekeland’s variational principle for set-valued mappings with applications

In this paper, we obtain a general Ekeland’s variational principle for set-valued mappings in complete metric space, which is different from those in [G.Y. Chen, X.X. Huang, Ekeland’s ε-variational principle for set-valued mapping, Mathematical Methods of Operations Research 48 (1998) 181–186; G.Y. Chen, X.X. Huang, S.H. Hou, General Ekeland’s Variational Principle for Set-Valued Mappings, Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications 106 (2000) 151–164; S.J. Li, W.Y. Zhang, On Ekeland’s variational Principle for set-valued mappings, Acta Mathematicae Application Sinica, English Series 23 (2007) 141–148]. By the result, we prove some existence results for a general vector equilibrium problem under nonconvex and compact or noncompact assumptions of its domain, respectively. Moreover, we give some equivalent results to the variational principle.