Phelps’ lemma, Danes’ drop theorem and Ekeland’s principle in locally convex spaces

A generalization of Phelps' lemma to locally convex spaces is proven, applying its well-known Banach space version. We show the equivalence of this theorem, Ekeland's principle and Danes' drop theorem in locally convex spaces to their Banach space counterparts and to a Pareto efficiency theorem due to Isac. This solves a problem, concerning the drop theorem, proposed by G. Isac in 1997. We show that a different formulation of Ekeland's principle in locally convex spaces, using a family of topology generating seminorms as perturbation functions rather than a single (in general discontinuous) Minkowski functional, turns out to be equivalent to the original version.