A number of applications from mathematical programmings, such as minimization problems, variational inequality problems and fixed point problems, can be written as equilibrium problems. Most of the schemes being used to solve this problem involve iterative methods, and for that reason, in this paper, we introduce a modified iterative method to solve equilibrium problems in real Hilbert space. This method can be seen as a modification of the paper titled “A new two-step proximal algorithm of solving the problem of equilibrium programming” by Lyashko et al. (Optimization and its applications in control and data sciences, Springer book pp. 315–325, 2016). A weak convergence result has been proven by considering the mild conditions on the cost bifunction. We have given the application of our results to solve variational inequality problems. A detailed numerical study on the Nash–Cournot electricity equilibrium model and other test problems is considered to verify the convergence result and its performance.