On finite termination of an iterative method for linear complementarity problems

Based on a well-known reformulation of the linear complementarity problem (LCP) as a nondifferentiable system of nonlinear equations, a Newton-type method will be described for the solution of LCPs. Under certain assumptions, it will be shown that this method has a finite termination property, i.e., if an iterate is sufficiently close to a solution of LCP, the method finds this solution in one step. This result will be applied to a recently proposed algorithm by Harker and Pang in order to prove that their algorithm also has the finite termination property.