Reddit reviews Agent-Based and Individual-Based Modeling: A Practical Introduction
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Used Book in Good Condition
Here is a run down on the subject. I don't have experience with it besides looking at some articles and a couple talks on the application of agent based modeling in ecology. Talked with some REU mentors a lot about it, too.
Say you are interested in modelling the rate of disease in a population. We will assume that once you become infected, you stay infected. Typically, we would use one differential equation to model the rate of being infected and the rate of being susceptible to a disease over time.
You'd add in birth and death processes and eventually make your model more realistic for the disease spread scenario you are looking at. An issue that arises is: the spread of the disease could be stochastic, and individuals become infected without some deterministic formula (e.g. spread of disease is hard to measure even if you had alot of resources and money). You can turn your simple system of ODE's into a stochastic approximation using the Gillespie algorithm. The change from being susceptible to infected, as well as other parts of the system of ODE's, is now governed by a pseudorandom number generation process that is used to account for uncertainty of how the two groups work together.
The benefits of the stochastic approximation is you can have a carrying capacity (some asymptote) that is a positive integer, where as with a continuous system of ODE's you could get a result of, say, 12.3 infected individuals at t=500. The other added benefit is the acknowledgment and formulation of uncertainty in the real-life scenario you are trying to model.
Since computation is rarely an issue anymore, people started to wonder if instead of modeling groups of a population, we could model each individual of a population instead. Instead of having a system of two ODE's, or two stochastic ODE's, we have a system of 1000 individuals, each with their own formula. This has a lot of favor in ecology and biomathematics modeling.
Doing an agent based model on your own would be tough - there are programs that do the hard work for you. I don't know if SAS has anything; I know base MATLAB doesn't. R might.
This book looks good:
http://www.amazon.com/Agent-Based-Individual-Based-Modeling-Practical-Introduction/dp/0691136742/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1393906325&sr=1-1&keywords=agent+based+and+individual+based+modeling
Responding publicly to: "Any recommendations for stuff to read about agent based modeling?"
One of the best resources for agent based modeling is the modeling tool, NetLogo. It's developed by Northwestern:
https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/
It has TONS of sample models in quite a few different disciplines to see how things work.
Railsback and Grimm have a nice textbook style book on agent based modeling (http://www.amazon.com/Agent-Based-Individual-Based-Modeling-Practical-Introduction/dp/0691136742)
Mitchel and Resnick have a smaller book focused on the concepts of ABM called Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams. (http://www.amazon.com/Turtles-Termites-Traffic-Jams-Explorations/dp/0262680939)
Lastly Growing Artificial Societies by Epstien (http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Artificial-Societies-Science-Adaptive/dp/0262550253). He developed generative models of economics using an environment he called "Sugarscape".
Another popular modeling system is Repast (written by people at Argonne National Labs) but I think it's not as easy for the non-programmer to get started with. If you happen to be near University of Oregon, they are having a complexity conference later this month that features a day-long seminar on Repast taught by some guys from Argonne.
http://calendar.uoregon.edu/event/exploring_complexity
I guess computational economics is many different things to many different people. Easiest way to combine your degrees would probably be to look into something like machine learning applied to the domain of economics. Related is the whole area of financial engineering. There are quite a lot of MOOCs that cover various aspects of that.
An area I find very interesting is Agent Based Modeling. It's still not a very respected field though it has grown quite a lot. A good introductory book is Agent-Based and Individual-Based Modeling: A Practical Introduction. It's a bit on the practical side but a very nice read. If you want to go further into that area, there are many areas of research that combine CS and economics.