%0 Journal Article %T Combinatorial Characterizations of K-matrices %A Jan Foniok %A Komei Fukuda %A Lorenz Klaus %J Mathematics %D 2009 %I arXiv %R 10.1016/j.laa.2010.08.008 %X We present a number of combinatorial characterizations of K-matrices. This extends a theorem of Fiedler and Ptak on linear-algebraic characterizations of K-matrices to the setting of oriented matroids. Our proof is elementary and simplifies the original proof substantially by exploiting the duality of oriented matroids. As an application, we show that a simple principal pivot method applied to the linear complementarity problems with K-matrices converges very quickly, by a purely combinatorial argument. %U http://arxiv.org/abs/0911.2171v3