Gâteaux differentiability of the dual gap function of a variational inequality

In terms of the mapping involved in a variational inequality, we characterize the Gâteaux differentiability of the dual gap function G and present several sufficient conditions for its directional derivative expression, including one weaker than that of Danskin [J.M. Danskin, The theory of max–min, with applications, SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics 14 (1966) 641–664]. When the solution set of a variational inequality problem is contained in that of its dual problem, the Gâteaux differentiability of G on the latter turns out to be equivalent to the conditions appearing in the authors’ recent results about the weakly sharp solutions of the variational inequality problem.