Well, I was just sort of making stuff up, so I'm not surprised there no literature :P

But what was going through my head was that a one-shot game can be turned into an iterated game just by breaking the decisions and payoff into pieces and setting it up so that people share information at regular intervals unless they pay a prohibitive cost. Depending on the real-world situation, this may just be a different framing of the same thing - e.g. the rats on a Malthusian island.

Many players vs. two players seems like the bigger gulf between tragedy of the commons and iterated PD (which I'm just bringing up because we understand well why cooperation arises in it). Worst case the players would have to set up a government-like body to effect the right payoffs, and then there's no point to trying to be clever with getting people to play tit-for-tat. I'd guess that there are still good cooperative / reciprocal strategies in iterated multiplayer PD, but I'd need to see a tournament and have someone smart figure it out for me :)