“…It is not only a generalization of the Banach contraction principle [4] but it has also been proven to be equivalent to metric completeness [14,Theorem 6]. Moreover, it has been the subject of various generalizations and extensions (see e.g., [1,5,7] and the related references therein). For instance, in attempting to generalize Caristi's fixed point theorem, Kirk [12] raised the problem of whether a self-mapping T has a fixed point on a metric space (M, d) such that for all x ∈ M η(d(x, T x)) ≤ φ(x) − φ(T x), where η is a function from R + , the set of all nonnegative reals, into R + , having appropriate properties.…”