Using the author's own experiences, this chapter shows how agent-based modeling (ABM) can address research questions common to many disciplines, facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, provide a useful multidisciplinary tool when the math is intractable, and reveal unity across disciplines....

Consider a population of farmers who live around a lake. Each farmer engages in trade with his two adjacent neighbors. The trade is governed by a prisoner's dilemma "rule of engagement". A farmer's payoff is the sum of the payoffs from the two prisoner's dilemma games played with his two...