  Chinese auctions are a combination between a raffle and an auction and are
held in practice at charity events or festivals. In a Chinese auction, multiple
players compete for several items by buying tickets, which can be used to win
the items. In front of each item there is a basket, and the players can bid by
placing tickets in the basket(s) corresponding to the item(s) they are trying
to win. After all the players have placed their tickets, a ticket is drawn at
random from each basket and the item is given to the owner of the winning
ticket. While a player is never guaranteed to win an item, they can improve
their chances of getting it by increasing the number of tickets for that item.
  In this paper we investigate the existence of pure Nash equilibria in both
the continuous and discrete settings. When the players have continuous budgets,
we show that a pure Nash equilibrium may not exist for asymmetric games when
some valuations are zero. In that case we prove that the auctioneer can
stabilize the game by placing his own ticket in each basket. On the other hand,
when all the valuations are strictly positive, a pure Nash equilibrium is
guaranteed to exist, and the equilibrium strategies are symmetric when both
valuations and budgets are symmetric. We also study Chinese auctions with
discrete budgets, for which we give both existence results and counterexamples.
While the literature on rent-seeking contests traditionally focuses on
continuous costly tickets, the discrete variant is very natural and more
closely models the version of the auction held in practice.
