Dedicated to Professor Olvi Mangasarian on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday

In this paper we reformulate several NCP-functions for the nonlinear complementarity problem (NCP) from their merit function forms and study some important properties of these NCP-functions. We point out that some of these NCP-functions have all the nice properties investigated by Chen, Chen and Kanzow [2] for a modified Fischer-Burmeister function, while some other NCP-functions may lose one or several of these properties. We also provide a modified normal map and a smoothing technique to overcome the limitation of these NCP-functions. A numerical comparison for the behaviour of various NCP-functions is provided.