Specialist or Add-on? Resource Scope, Redeployability and the Conditional Economics of Integrating Whole-Body Electromyostimulation into European Service Businesses — Analysis Protocol (version 2.5)

This document is a time-stamped analysis protocol for Paper 1 of a doctoral research programme in Business Administration. It was written after preliminary inspection of the data and is therefore NOT a prospective preregistration. It fixes the estimands, economic model, parameter-bounding rules, decision rules and validation steps before the final computation. Research question: When do the scale-free and redeployable resources of an existing service business make adding supervised conductive whole-body electromyostimulation (WB-EMS) cheaper and less irreversible than delivering it through a specialist studio, and when do the opportunity costs of non-scale-free resources and demand displacement reverse that advantage? Design: secondary-data economic modelling with evidence-graded parameter envelopes. Estimands are (E1) the operating-cost difference per session between integrated and specialist delivery, (E2) the host adoption threshold against no EMS, (E3) break-even utilisation, (E4) sunk-capital exposure and (E5) two reversal frontiers (host adoption and cross-form contribution). Results are classified as integration favoured, specialist favoured, assumption-sensitive or not identified. No surveys or interviews are used, and no probability distributions are invented. Scope: sports and fitness as the core sector; Romania as the calibration anchor, where verified financial filings and advertised prices overlap; Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Poland and Bulgaria as conditional scenario cells; period 2019–2025, with 2026 treated as interim. The protocol reports the integrity checks of the input data and their SHA-256 hashes, known limitations stated in advance, a conflict-of-interest statement, a related-party disclosure register and an entity-verification worksheet. SHA-256 of the deposited PDF: 82e65be86b4f3bb66c7b7cdd8cac7ccd72ba892e8b69917e6ce41f700ea2ab78