Criteria for bounded valence of harmonic mappings

In 1984, Gehring and Pommerenke proved that if the Schwarzian derivative $S(f)$ of a locally univalent analytic function $f$ in the unit disk satisfies that $\limsup_{|z|\to 1} |S(f)(z)| (1-|z|^2)^2 < 2$, then there exists a positive integer $N$ such that $f$ takes every value at most $N$ times. Recently, Becker and Pommerenke have shown that the same result holds in those cases when the function $f$ satisfies that $\limsup_{|z|\to 1} |f"(z)/f'(z)|\, (1-|z|^2)< 1$. In this paper, we generalize these two criteria for bounded valence of analytic functions to the cases when $f$ is merely harmonic.