Growth behavior of a class of merit functions for the nonlinear complementarity problem

When the nonlinear complementarity problem is reformulated as that of finding the zero of a self-mapping, the norm of the selfmapping serves naturally as a merit function for the problem. We study the growth behavior of such a merit function. In particular, we show that, for the linear complementarity problem, whether the merit function is coercive is intimately related to whether the underlying matrix is aP-matrix or a nondegenerate matrix or anR _o-matrix. We also show that, for the more popular choices of the merit function, the merit function is bounded below by the norm of the natural residual raised to a positive integral power. Thus, if the norm of the natural residual has positive order of growth, then so does the merit function.This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation Grant No. CCR-93-11621.The author thanks Dr. Christian Kanzow for his many helpful comments on a preliminary version of this paper. He also thanks the referees for their helpful suggestions.