The purpose of this paper is to investigate the valency of planar harmonic mappings of bounded boundary rotation of the open unit disc
The paper is motivated by the earlier work of the first two authors [Complex Analysis Oper. Theory 5 (2011), 767–774] and the recent work of T. Hayami [Complex Var. Elliptic Equ. 59 (2014), 1214–1222]. First, the authors give a counterexample showing that both the main result of Hayami, Theorem 2.1, and the related conjecture, Conjecture 4.1, are false. Second, the authors give a valency criterion for planar harmonic mappings of bounded boundary rotation of
, proving an ameliorated statement of Theorem 2.1 and settling a modified version of Conjecture 4.1.