Coercivity conditions for equilibrium problems

The study of the existence of solutions of equilibrium problems on unbounded domains involves usually the same sufficient assumptions as for bounded domains together with a coercivity condition. We focus on two different conditions: the first is obtained assuming the existence of a bounded set such that no elements outside is a candidate for a solution; the second allows the solution set to be unbounded. Our results exploit the generalized monotonicity properties of the function f defining the equilibrium problem. It turns out that, in both the pseudomonotone and the quasimonotone setting, an equivalence can be stated between the nonemptyness and boundedness of the solution set and these coercivity conditions. In the pseudomonotone case, we compare our coercivity conditions with various coercivity conditions that appeared in the literature.