The key difference of B2B-OS compared to many other agent-based marketplace projects is the absence of a central arbitrator or auctioneer, and the implementation of a strictly decentralized automated negotiation (bargaining) protocol. The goods that are traded are defined as commodities, so the only negotiation variable is the price.

The competition between agents of the same type leads to an individual agent strategy, where concession making and greediness is in some sort of balance as a functional result of nothing but the strategies of the other agents in the population.

The B2B-OS agents use an adaptive strategy based on a non-deterministic finite state automaton (non-det FSM), in which action paths are taken depending on stochastic probes against certain internal parameters. It is not a goal of B2B-OS to simulate real human behavior, but to compare future automated negotiation strategies, which are expected to be mostly derived from deterministic rule-based models with only a handful of variables.