Post-acquisition integration outcomes remain hard to predict at signing: meta-analysis attributes their variance to unidentified moderators, yet the field lacks a structural, pre-close, checkable predictor. This study tests, confirmatorily and at large N, whether a closing-time cascade gap – a product–process or process–organization mismatch created when an asset or process crosses the ownership boundary without its adjacent producing or governing tier transferring alongside it – is a necessary condition for a cascade-type integration failure realized over three to five years. On a case-control sample of 350 completed transactions drawn on deal structure and coded from disjoint evidence by rotated raters, the necessary-condition relationship is supported only in a bounded form: conditional on no detected gap, the cascade-type failure rate is low (.073, exact upper 95% bound .112) yet not zero, and only about half of failures carried a gap (necessity consistency .517). Structural conformance therefore functions as a bounded safe harbor and a pre-close negative screen for one failure mode, not as a strong necessary condition or a general predictor of deal success. The separated-measurement and structure-based sampling design is a contribution alongside the estimate, and the sampling frame's rate of announced-but-unconsummated bids is a reportable methodological finding. Includes zharnikov-2026bi-cascade-gap-largen.yaml (Paper Spec v0.1.0) – a machine-readable specification of the paper's claims, assumptions, and dependencies. The paper's full machine-first bundle (the SPINE claim/dependency graph and the ONTOLOGY term module) lives in the public repository; see https://github.com/spectralbranding/paper-spec for the standard. This PDF is generated programmatically from that machine-first source under a research-as-repository model.
Dmitry Zharnikov (Sun,) studied this question.