With the proliferation of smart devices and growing connectivity, system components are required to use cooperative strategies in order to optimally allocate available resources and improve performance. Such cooperation is crucial in an increasing variety of problems ranging from the deployment of sensor networks, to distributed cloud services, to self healing networks, etc. In this talk, we propose new models of cooperation for multi-user communication and compression systems, specifically we focus on (a) Multiple-access channels (MAC) with encoder cooperation and (b) Successive Refinement (SR) setting with decoder cooperation. We propose schemes which achieve the fundamental limits highlighting benefits of cooperation and use the insight gained to draw duality between MAC and SR setting