Karen Elliott House has been elected chairman of the RAND Corporation Board of Trustees. House previously was vice chairman of the RAND Board. Richard Danzig, former U.S. Secretary of the Navy, was elected to succeed House as vice chairman of the Board. RAND also announced the election of Kenneth Feinberg and Ambassador Philip Lader to the RAND Board of Trustees. House succeeds Paul G. Kaminski, a technology company executive and former Pentagon official who chairs the Defense Science Board. Kaminski served as RAND's chairman since 2009. Feinberg is managing partner of Feinberg Rozen, LLP. Lader is a former U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James's (19972001) and currently is chairman of WPP plc.

Jeffrey Wasserman, a health policy expert who has led efforts to strengthen the United States' preparedness for a major health event, has been named vice president and director of the health research division at the The RAND Corporation. Jeffrey Wasserman will provide the leadership and vision necessary to guide and strengthen the important work done by RAND Health, Rich said. During this period of rapid change in the U.S. health care system, the work done by RAND health is important to helping the nation chart the right path forward. Wasserman is a longtime RAND researcher and a widely recognized expert on health policy issues. He has led efforts to create the National Health Security Strategy, a federal project to prepare the nation's health system to respond to large-scale incidents, such as a terrorist attack or a pandemic disease outbreak, that could pose a major threat to the public's health.

The RAND Corporation announced a new method for estimating the costs of counterfeiting. The approach uses market data to estimate the effects of intellectual property rights infringements, such as counterfeit products, on sales of legitimate goods. The method relies on comparing previous sales forecasts with actual sales data to estimate unfulfilled demand for a product, and presuming that the difference is at least in part caused by counterfeit products. This methodology delivered very credible results when applied to confidential data made available by a multinational technology company producing consumer goods targeted by counterfeiters. Researchers announced that further piloting is required to refine the method and build evidence about its wider applicability. The benefits of this new method in comparison with alternatives are: cost-effectiveness, broad applicability to multiple products and markets, comparability by enabling systematic comparisons across firms or markets, and reproducibility. The approach does not rely on seizure and enforcement data, which are commonly used to estimate the magnitude of counterfeit markets but are notoriously unstable.