This volume contains refereed papers on themes explored at the AMS-IMS-SIAM Summer Research Conference, Commutative Algebra: Syzygies, Multiplicities, and Birational Algebra, held at Mount Holyoke College in 1992. The conference featured a series of one-hour invited lectures on recent advances in commutative algebra and interactions with such areas as algebraic geometry, representation theory, and combinatorics. The major themes of the conference were tight closure Hilbert functions, birational algebra, free resolutions and the homological conjectures, Rees algebras, and local cohomology. With contributions by several leading experts in the field, this volume provides an excellent survey of current research in commutative algebra.