from multi-description/multi-path routing to content distribution in p2p networks to community networking, many forms of resource sharing have, recently, been proposed to improve the network performance. from the perspective of any one user and when ignoring the interaction among users, all such schemes reduce to various forms of providing parallelism. in this talk, we argue that focusing on parallelism is by no means sufficient. when considering more users in the system, these strategies provide forms of statistical multiplexing advantage, while possibly increasing the network load via increased redundancy, overhead increase, and even contention inefficiency. in this talk, we illustrate the issue of resource sharing in the above context via a multi-queue multi-server problem. even though such model might not be perfectly realistic, it does capture some of the above trade-offs. we use this model to provide analytical results in a special case of homogeneous users and servers. furthermore, we prove the robustness of a certain locally optimal strategy to non- cooperation in a nash equilibrium/strategy context.