Slopes of multifunctions and extensions of metric regularity (Q2446156)

The scope of this paper is to introduce several notions of slopes for multifunctions and to show how these can be employed for characterizing different types of metric regularity. Firstly, several kinds of slopes for real-valued functions are reviewed and they are extended for multifunctions, by means of a carefully chosen scalarization function. As the authors observe, some of these slopes of multifunctions were already considered in various instances in the literature, but a unitary theory for them was still missing. The classical metric regularity and the one along a subspace of a multifunction are then characterized by means of the associated slopes. Moreover, some of these results are generalized, too, for set-valued mappings depending on a parameter, where the uniform metrical regularity is characterized, and for separable (product) mappings, for which the metrical multi-regularity is equivalently written by means of the associated slopes. It is also worth noting that the new notions and the related results are illustrated with appropriate examples.