Abstract. In this paper, we deal with the semi-infinite complementarity problems (SICP), in which several important issues are covered, such as solvability, semismoothness of residual functions, and error bounds. In particular, we characterize the solution set by investigating the relationship between SICP and the classical complementarity problem. 1 Furthermore, we show that the SICP can be equivalently reformulated as a typical semiinfinite min-max programming problem by employing NCP functions. Finally, we study the concept of error bounds and introduce its two variants, ε-error bounds and weak error bounds, where the concept of weak error bounds is highly desirable in that the solution set is not restricted to be nonempty. Key words. semi-infinite complementarity problem, semidifferentiable and semismooth, error bounds, weak error bounds