Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Many defendants fail to appear (FTA) for their court dates despite consequences that can include arrest and additional fines. In an RCT to reduce FTAs in a county's traffic, criminal and municipal courts, we compare a nudge reminder to a nudge combined with personalized assistance. The treatments decrease FTA by 39 percent from a base FTA rate of 21 percentage points. Although there is no difference in the treatments' efficacy in reducing FTA, the two treatments induce different manners of case resolution. The reminder intervention prompts defendants to appear at their arraignments, while personalized assistance facilitates greater usage of court accommodations, such as rescheduling and payment plans. Additionally, we use the reminder treatment as an instrument to assess the impact of an FTA on defendants. We find that in cases that cannot be paid online and an FTA results in a default sentence, defendants who FTA may be optimizing; in other cases, the magnitudes of the cost suggest FTAing results from misoptimization.