使用家庭扫描仪数据理解支付卡偏好

Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C.ISSN 1936-2854 (Print)ISSN 2767-3898 (Online) Understanding Preferences for Payment Cards using HouseholdScanner Data Marc Rysman, Shuang Wang, Krzysztof Wozniak 2025-096 Please cite this paper as:Rysman, Marc, Shuang Wang, and Krzysztof Wozniak (2025).“Understanding Prefer-ences for Payment Cards using Household Scanner Data,” Finance and Economics Dis-cussion Series 2025-096. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,https://doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2025.096. NOTE: Staff working papers in the Finance and Economics Discussion Series (FEDS) are preliminarymaterials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment.The analysis and conclusions set forthare those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by other members of the research staff or theBoard of Governors. References in publications to the Finance and Economics Discussion Series (other thanacknowledgement) should be cleared with the author(s) to protect the tentative character of these papers. Understanding Preferences for Payment Cards usingHousehold Scanner Data∗ Marc RysmanBoston UniversityShuang Wang†Charles River AssociatesKrzysztof WozniakFederal Reserve Board September 15, 2025 Abstract We use consumer panel scanner data to examine households’ payment choices, a new ap-plication of such data. In particular, we study the long-term shift towards payment cards, aswell as the role of transaction size in determining choices. We find that idiosyncratic householdpreferences are a key driver of payment choice.Our estimates suggest that transaction size,while important, may have a smaller effect on payment choice than previously thought, andthat the effect varies substantially across households. Our results further suggest that idiosyn-cratic household preferences evolve slowly over time, explaining only a third of the increase incard use over the seven-year period in our data.Taken together, our findings have potentialpolicy implications not just for the adoption of new methods such as instant payments, but alsoaround potential costs to households from sun-setting older payment methods such as checks. 1Introduction Over the past several decades, the US payments system has shifted from paper payment instru-ments, namely cash and check, to digital instruments, such as debit cards and credit cards. Thisshift is important because digital payments are typically regarded as superior in many dimensions:they are faster and cheaper to process, easier for customers to keep track of, and in many ways offersuperior protection from crime and fraud. Despite this change, however, cash and check continue to play a large role in the United States. Anecdotal evidence of young people adopting digital paymentwhile older households persist with cash and check suggests that demographics and heterogeneitybetween households could be key to explaining the enduring popularity of paper payment instru-ments.As alternative payment methods multiply and traditional payment methods come underscrutiny as being inefficient and fraud-prone, understanding the determinants of payment methodchoice is of substantial policy interest.1 This paper studies the determinants of payment method choice in both the short and longterm. In the short term, across shopping trips, we focus on the transaction size as an importantdeterminant. Transaction size has been central to the discussion of payment choice, with householdsmore likely to pay with non-cash instruments for larger transactions. Previous papers, such as Klee(2008) and Wang and Wolman (2016), have studied the effect of transaction size on payment choiceby using scanner data drawn from retailers.However, because these datasets did not allow theauthors to track individuals over time, the resulting estimates were not able to separate the withinand between effects. In particular, while the previous literature documents that the choice of cardis correlated with the size of the transaction, it is possible that this results from households thatpay with cards more often having higher transaction sizes on average.In this paper, we use acomprehensive consumer panel dataset to study payment method choice for the first time, whichallows us to fully separate the within and between effects. We also study the long-term evolution of payment method choice. While it is natural to ascribechanges in card use to changes in household preferences, alternative explanations are that thereare shifts in the composition of transaction volumes or transaction sizes.For instance, if olderhouseholds prefer cash and check while younger households prefer cards, gradual growth over timein the number of transactions made by younger households would result in an aggregate increase incard usage even if household preferences for payment methods did not actually change. Naturally,household expiration by older households and household formation by younger households wouldhave a similar effect. Our