Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!

The Society Pages “Progressing from game theory to agent based modelling to simulate social emergence”

This is a nice albeit pretty choppy explanation for why we should not listen to orthodox/traditional game theorists. The only argument I see missing here is that game theory relies on the assumption of a well-mixed population: even the Prisoner’s Dilemma played within a spatially-explicit structure can produce “irrational” cooperation.

I really like the ‘ecological’ component of this piece. A dynamic economy — like a dynamic ecological community — demands strategies that are plastic and reactive to local context.