In this paper, we study the existence of nontrivial solution for a class of elliptic problems of the form ÀDu þ u ¼ f p;d ðuðxÞÞ a.e in X where X & R N is an exterior domain for N [ 2 and f p;d : R ! R is an odd discontinuous function given by( with a [ 0; d [ 0 and p 2 ð2; 2 Ã Þ. For small enough d and a, seeking help of the dual functional corresponding to the problem, we prove existence of at least one positive solution when R N nX & B r ð0Þ for sufficiently small r. Keywords Nonlinear elliptic equations Á Variational methods Á Nonsmooth analysis Mathematics Subject Classification 35J60 Á 35A15 Á 49J52 C. O. Alves was partially supported by CNPq/Brazil 304804/2017-7.This article is part of the section ''Theory of PDEs'' edited by Eduardo Teixeira.