A combinatorial abstraction of the linear complementarity theory in the setting of oriented matroids was rst considered by M.J. Todd. In this paper, we take a fresh look at this abstraction, and attempt to give a simple treatment of the combinatorial theory of linear complementarity. We obtain new theorems, proofs and algorithms in oriented matroids whose specializations to the linear case are also new. For this, the notion of suciency of square matrices, introduced by Cottle, Pang and Venkateswaran, is extended to oriented matroids. Then, we prove a sort of duality theorem for oriented matroids, which roughly states: exactly one of the primal and the dual system has a complementary solution if the associated oriented matroid satisfies "weak" sufficiency. We give two different proofs for this theorem, an elementary inductive proof and an algorithmic proof using the criss-cross method which solves one of the primal or dual problem by using surprisingly simple pivot rules (without any pertur...

In this paper we generalize the so-called first-in-last-out pivot rule and the most-often-selected-variable pivot rule for the simplex method, as proposed in Zhang [13], to the crisscross pivot setting where neither the primal nor the dual feasibility is preserved. The finiteness of the new criss-cross pivot variants is proven.