A study of tilt-stable optimality and sufficient conditions

Recent results by Eberhard et al. (2006) [4] and Eberhard and Wenczel (2009) [3] on the interaction of single-and double-envelope operations of nonsmooth functions and their interaction with second-order derivations have been used to study tilt-stability of local minima. This continues the study begun by Poliquin and Rockafellar (1998) [1] but now, armed with new tools we are able to make some new observations. We observe that tilt-stability entails a local density within the graph of the proximal subderivative of strict local minima order two of the tilted function. Indeed, it also entails the strict local minimality (order two) of the tilt-stable local minimum itself. For prox-regular, subdifferentially continuous functions this density property characterises tilt stability. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.