Coalition formation problems arise when groups of agents need to work together to achieve tasks in an environment — such as bidding for a contract or bulk buying goods. The work presented here shows how current theories for coalition formation can be combined with notions from iterative games to cover cases where populations of agents must solve coalition problems many times — modelling a long series of coalition games rather than just a single one.

The paper includes a problem formulation for iterative coalition games, experimental results for a simple coalition game world demonstrating how strong coalitions can emerge over time even from basic strategies and a discussion of the interactions between different strategies over time.