Compound Discounting(?)

Question

I am a programmer interning at a small contract furniture company. This company receives multiple discounts from the manufacturers, and I am trying to calculate the end discount. For example, the first discount is 50%, the second discount is 20% off that price, and the third is 20% of that, then the total discount is 68%. They already have an Excel worksheet that calculates this, but I want to write a recursive function that can perform this calculation as many times as is necessary. My question is; what is this type of discounting called?

Answer 1

This is in general simply referred to as compounding. In functional terms, consider the inefficient python code below

def total_discount(rates):
    return (1.0 - discount(1.0, rates))*100.0

def discount(original, rates):
    if len(rates) == 1:
        return (1.0-rates[0]/100.0)*original
    else:
        return (1.0-rates[0]/100.0)*discount(original, rates[1:])

This type of thing is often seen in forward rates.