Since the early stages of human society, sharing practices have been a fundamental pillar in societies aiming to manage natural resources, knowledge and common goods in a profitable way. There is a strong scientific narrative based on social experiments, observational techniques, ethnographic methodologies and other approaches that explores and analyzes human behaviours in terms of cooperation and community building.
Most of these theories - mainly developed in contemporary times - aim to demonstrate how, on certain occasions, acting together brings much more to the community than doing the same activity individually or in a selfish manner. Nonetheless, given the novelty of the sharing economy there exists a lack of empirical studies attempting to merge both previous and current manners of collaborative behaviours (including online networks) thus, the main goal of this paper is to construct a theoretical bridge that connects previous theories on cooperation and the new so-called collaborative/sharing economy defined by online networks.