Error bounds in metric spaces and application to the perturbation stability of metric regularity

This paper was motivated by the need to establish some new characterizations of the metric regularity of set-valued mappings. Through these new characterizations it was possible to investigate the global/local perturbation stability of the metric regularity and to extend a result by Ioffe [Set-Valued Anal., 9 (2001), pp. 101-109] on the perturbation stability of the global metric regularity when the image space is not necessarily complete. It was also possible to give a characterization of the local metric regularity and to derive a local version of the perturbation stability of the metric regularity. In this work we also describe an application of this perturbation stability and give a simple proof of a result on the error bound of 2-regular mappings established by Izmailov and Solodov [Math. Program., 89 (2001), pp. 413-435] and generalized by He and Sun [Math. Oper. Res., 30 (2005), pp. 701-717].