In this paper, we first give two fundamental principles to characterize conformal vector fields of \((\alpha ,\beta )\) -spaces to be homothetic and determine the local structure of those homothetic fields. Then we use the principles to study conformal vector fields of \((\alpha ,\beta )\) -spaces under certain curvature conditions. Besides, we construct a family of non-homothetic conformal vector fields on a family of locally projectively flat Randers spaces.
