Coalition Formation
Agents form temporary subgroups around a task because the coalition can achieve more value than the sum of its members acting alone, with explicit rules for who joins and how payoff or credit is shared.
Problem
Static team rosters do not match the problem. Some problems need three specialists, others need eight generalists, others need only the agent who already holds context. Either there is a fixed multi-agent topology that wastes capacity on small problems and underprovisions for large ones, or there is no coordination and the agents work alone. Worse, when a coalition does form ad hoc, the credit/payoff allocation is implicit and political: contributors who did the heaviest lifting do not get the credit, and over time agents stop volunteering.
Solution
Define a value function v(S) for any subset S of agents on a given task. A coalition-formation protocol enumerates candidate coalitions, scores them, and chooses the one with the best value/cost ratio. A payoff-allocation rule (Shapley value, equal split, proportional to contribution, weighted by reputation) determines how the coalition's reward is split. Coalitions are temporary: once the task is done, the coalition dissolves and agents return to the pool. For LLM agents this can be lighter — a coordinator picks a few agents per task based on heuristics rather than full optimisation.
When to use
- Agents have heterogeneous capabilities and tasks vary in shape.
- Some tasks are super-additive in agent contribution.
- Reputation or payoff matters for agent engagement.
Open the full interactive page →
Diagram, neighbourhood map, code examples, related patterns and full provenance.