Willingness to Pay for Shared and Digitally Booked Transport among Low-Income Commuters after Fuel Price Increases

When Nigeria removed its fuel subsidy at the end of May 2023 the pump price rose by 129.2 percent in a month, and transport fares followed unevenly: within-city bus fares rose 116.4, 67.9 and 95.4 percent in Lagos, Osun and Kwara while motorcycle fares rose only 20.0, 46.2 and 5.3. That pass-through differential frames the question: what would a low-income commuter pay for shared and digitally booked transport at fares like these? We answer it with a stated preference experiment administered in the final quarter of 2023 to 1,080 low-income commuters across the three states, yielding 8,640 choices, whose design and estimation are reported in full. The paper’s contribution is methodological. Multinomial logit, mixed logit and latent class specifications were fitted to identical choices. The multinomial logit holds preferences homogeneous, so it yields one willingness to pay for the whole market rather than a share of it, and it ranks last on every information criterion. Of the three specifications that spread willingness to pay across the market, the mixed logit puts 48.2 percent below an assumed 431 naira cost of provision, a two-class latent class model 54.6 and a three-class one 62.6, fourteen points on specification alone. Goodness of fit does not order those figures usefully: the criteria rank the three-class model first, the two-class second and the mixed logit last of the three, the reverse of their order on the share, so the model chosen on fit is the one that would justify the largest subsidy and nothing inside any single estimation says whether it should. Reporting a range across specifications, rather than a point from whichever fits best, is the practical conclusion.