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This study examined how audience characteristics and attitudes relate to their perceptions of sincerity and forgiveness of apologies by public figures posted on YouTube.

Four hundred twenty-seven adult participants recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk completed an online survey via Qualtrics. Participants were randomly assigned to view two of four public figure apologies posted on YouTube.

Results indicated that audience fandom and perceived reputation and attractiveness of the public figure were related to perceptions of sincerity and forgiveness; and perceptions of sincerity and forgiveness were related to intentions of future support.

“Sameness” between the public figure and audience did not garner a more favorable response to the apology, and this is not consistent with earlier studies. For race similarity, the results could have been a reflection of the low number of non-White participants. However, results could indicate that “sameness” is not as simplistic as demographic sameness, such as race, sex or age.

The authors’ findings elevate the importance of gathering and benchmarking pre-crisis attitudinal research to better equip and inform communication professionals for crisis response. In addition, the study suggests that a public figure's strong reputation and fanbase provide a type of inoculation, lessening reputational damage.

The finding that perceived attractiveness relates positively to perceptions of sincerity and forgiveness is consistent with psychological research indicating attractiveness has many positive social implications – even in mediated communication.

Evidence suggests social media apologies matter. Communication professionals need to approach apology opportunities with a keen awareness that relational outcomes and intentions of future support can shift based on social media audiences' attitudes related to the public figure.

Port competition attracted much scholarly attention in Northwest Europe during the 1980s. Following the rise of powerful economies in East Asia, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, port competition has become an important phenomenon with the top five container ports in the world being located in the region. This paper aims to overview major port competition issues and outlines and analyzes the main alternative methodologies that researchers have employed to address them, referring to 70 items, mostly papers but including a few books and reports

In the maritime industry, it is vital to have a reliable forecast of container shipping demand. Although indicators of economic conditions have been used in modeling container shipping demand on major routes such as those from East Asia to the USA, the duration of such indicators’ effects on container movement demand have not been systematically examined. To bridge this gap in research, this study aims to identify the important US economic indicators that significantly affect the volume of container movements and empirically reveal the duration of such impacts.

The durability of economic indicators on container movements is identified by a vector autoregression (VAR) model using monthly-based time-series data. In the VAR model, this paper can analyze the effect of economic indicators at t-k on container movement at time t. In the model, this paper considers nine US economic indicators as explanatory variables that are likely to affect container movements. Time-series data are used for 228 months from January 2001 to December 2019.

In the mainland China route, “building permission” receives high impact and has a duration of 14 months, reflecting the fact that China exports a high volume of housing-related goods to the USA. Regarding the South Korea and Japan routes, where high volumes of machinery goods are exported to the USA, the “index of industrial production” receives a high impact with 11 and 13 months’ duration, respectively. On the Taiwan route, as several types of goods are transported with significant shares, “building permits” and “index of industrial production” have important effects.

Freight demand forecasting for bulk cargo is a popular research field because of the public availability of several time-series data. However, no study to date has measured the impact and durability of economic indicators on container movement. To bridge the gap in the literature in terms of the impact of economic indicators and their durability, this paper developed a time-series model of the container movement from East Asia to the USA.