  Most theorists have little more to say about desire strength than what appears above. An exception is found in the work of decision theorists: within decision theory, preference is given a formal characterization, and through this formal characterization, various results can be proven. A foundational result about desire strength is that, if a minimally rational person has set of pairwise preferences (for A over B, for C over D, and so on), these pairwise preferences can be used to determine the strengths of preferences. That is, from a large set of basic facts about what is preferred to what, facts about how much each thing must be preferred to the other can be derived (e.g., von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944).