Stable Collaboration Patterns of Self-Interested Agents in Iterative Request for Proposal Coalition Formation Environments

This paper explores a general model of economic exchange between heterogeneous agents representing firms, traders, or other socioeconomic entities, that self-organise into coalitions to fulfil specific tasks. In particular, the work addresses coalition formation problems in which many tasks are addressed to the same population over time in an iterative fashion. The purpose of the paper is to describe the necessary elements that lead the system to an equilibrium state and asses the impact of coalition size constraints on the type of collaboration patterns established between agents. By using a novel data mining technique called collaboration graphs it is possible to see that stable states can be reached using simple iterative protocols and that the number of stable states increases as the coalition size limit decreases.