Prisoners, chickens, volunteers, free riders and suckers: dilemmas on the Internet

The World Wide Web enables users to access a variety of multimedia resources distributed around the world. Its ease of use has attracted many new users to the Internet and the emergence of commercial Internet providers has facilitated this growth. Although most people welcome the breakdown of elitist access to the Internet, it has had an impact on the performance experienced by the individual user. `Game theory´ is used to examine the conflict of self interest versus group interest within a shared network environment like the Internet