In this work, we study coerciveness notions and their implications to existence conditions. We start with the presentation of classical ideas of coerciveness in the framework of Optimization Theory, and, then, using a classical technical result, introduced by Ky Fan in 1961, we extend these ideas first to Optimization Problems and then to Equilibrium Problems. We point out the importance of related conditions to the introduced coerciveness notion in order to obtain existence results for Equilibrium Problems, without using monotonicity or generalized monotonicity assumptions. © 2013 Brazilian Operations Research Society.