 An assumption built into Arrow’s framework is that preferences are ordinal and not interpersonally comparable: preference orderings contain no information about each individual’s strength of preference or about how to compare different individuals’ preferences with one another. Statements such as ‘Individual 1 prefers alternative \(x\) more than Individual 2 prefers alternative \(y\)’ or ‘Individual l prefers a switch from \(x\) to \(y\) more than Individual 2 prefers a switch from \(x^*\) to \(y^*\)’ are considered meaningless.