The Bishop-Phelps-Bollob\'as property and absolute sums

In this paper we study conditions assuring that the Bishop-Phelps-Bollob'as property (BPBp, for short) is inherited by absolute summands of the range space or of the domain space. Concretely, given a pair (X, Y) of Banach spaces having the BPBp, (a) if Y1 is an absolute summand of Y, then (X, Y1) has the BPBp; (b) if X1 is an absolute summand of X of type 1 or \infty, then (X1, Y) has the BPBp. Besides, analogous results for the BPBp for compact operators and for the density of norm attaining operators are also given. We also show that the Bishop-Phelps-Bollob'as property for numerical radius is inherited by absolute summands of type 1 or \infty. Moreover, we provide analogous results for numerical radius attaining operators and for the BPBp for numerical radius for compact operators.