Mergers and acquisitions continue to fail at high rates despite decades of research, with meta-analyses attributing the residual variance to unidentified moderators (King et al. 2004; Paumen et al. 2024). Extant explanations remain anchored at single organizational layers – cultural distance, executive turnover, strategic misfit, or business-model misalignment – leaving cross-layer propagation mechanisms underspecified. This paper develops a six-tier ontology of the acquisition target: Owner Intent, Business Model, Business Entity, Product, Process, and Organization. Each tier carries a distinct governor, specification surface, and transferability mode. The tiers form dual overlapping hierarchies – a service hierarchy running upward and a constraint hierarchy running downward – that jointly determine integration sequencing and generate seven falsifiable propositions on failure cascades. The framework applies across for-profit, NGO, cooperative, and state-owned forms through explicit substitution rules; the Tier 2, 4, and 5 substitutions are framed as provisional theoretical deductions awaiting empirical validation. The paper contributes (1) the first unified ontology that combines tier-level governors, transferability modes, and dual hierarchy structure, (2) a formal derivation of cross-tier propagation pathways, and (3) a structured Six-Tier Separability Diagnostic for pre-close risk assessment. Propositions are accompanied by explicit confirming and falsifying criteria throughout. Includes paper.yaml (Paper Spec v0.1.0) – a machine-readable specification of the paper's claims, assumptions, and dependencies. See https://github.com/spectralbranding/paper-spec for the standard.
Dmitry Zharnikov (Wed,) studied this question.