This volume brings together papers, which were ?rst presented at the
International Conference on Rational Choice, Individual Rights and
Non-Welfaristic Normative Economics, held in honour of Kotaro Suzumura
at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, on 11-13 March 2006, and which have
subsequently gone through the usual process of review by referees. We
have been helped by many individuals and institutions in organizing the
conference and putting this volume together. We are grateful to the
authors of this volume for contributing their papers and to the referees
who reviewed the papers. We gratefully acknowledge the very generous
fundings by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and
Technology, Japan, through the grant for the 21st Century Center of
Excellence (COE) Program on the Normative Evaluation and Social Choice
of Contemporary Economic Systems, and by the Japan Society for the
Promotion of Science, through the grant for International Scienti?c
Meetings in Japan, and the unstinted effort of the staff of the COE
Program at Hitotsubashi University, without which the conference in 2006
would not have been possible. We thank Dr. Martina Bihn, the Editorial
Director of Springer-Verlag for economics and business, for her advice
and help. Finally, we would like to mention that it has been a great
pleasure and privilege for us to edit this volume, which is intended to
be a tribute to Kotaro Suzumura's - mense intellectual contributions,
especially in the theory of rational choice, welfare economics, and the
theory of social choice. Riverside Prasanta K.
