Minimal Coercivity Conditions and Exceptional Families of Elements in Quasimonotone Variational Inequalities

A coercivity condition is usually assumed in variational inequalities over noncompact domains to guarantee the existence of a solution. We derive minimal, i.e., necessary coercivity conditions for pseudomonotone and quasimonotone variational inequalities to have a nonempty, possibly unbounded solution set. Similarly, a minimal coercivity condition is derived for quasimonotone variational inequalities to have a nonempty, bounded solution set, thereby complementing recent studies for the pseudomonotone case. Finally, for quasimonotone complementarity problems, previous existence results involving so-called exceptional families of elements are strengthened by considerably weakening assumptions in the literature.