Empires and percolation: stochastic merging of adjacent regions

We introduce a stochastic model in which adjacent planar regions A, B merge stochastically at some rate λ(A, B) and observe analogies with the well-studied topics of mean-field coagulation and of bond percolation. Do infinite regions appear in finite time? We give a simple condition on λ for this hegemony property to hold, and another simple condition for it to not hold, but there is a large gap between these conditions, which includes the case λ(A, B) ≡ 1. For this case, a non-rigorous analytic argument and simulations suggest hegemony.