On penalty and gap function methods for bilevel equilibrium problems (Q410808)

Summary: We consider bilevel pseudomonotone equilibrium problems. We use a penalty function to convert a bilevel problem into one-level ones. We generalize a pseudo-\(\nabla\)-monotonicity concept from \(\nabla\)-monotonicity and prove that under pseudo-\(\nabla\)-monotonicity property any stationary point of a regularized gap function is a solution of the penalized equilibrium problem. As an application, we discuss a special case that arises from the Tikhonov regularization method for pseudomonotone equilibrium problems.